PowerShell Automation – Purge version history older then 6 months and keep only 20 versions in SharePoint 2013

In SharePoint 2013, you can enable version history and see all of the different versions of the documents. I had a request to first purge version history older than 6 months and for any versions that remain, they would want to keep only 20 versions. Since there were many documents in the library, I created a script to run once and to meet this requirement.

Solution:

$web = get-spweb “SharePointWebName”
$doclib = $web.Lists[“List”] $startdate = get-date
write-host “Started on: ” $startdate

$doclib.Items | % {

$item = $_
$itemName = $item.Name

#First, they want to purge data older than a certain date (let’s say 6 months old now, but this may change)
for($i=$item.Versions.Count-1; $i -gt 0; $i–)
{
$version = $item.Versions[$i] [datetime]$versionDate = ($version.Created -split ” “)[0] [datetime]$dateDifference = ((get-date).AddMonths(-6) -split ” “)[0]

#if (($itemName -eq “test.docx”))
#{
if ($versionDate -lt $dateDifference)
{
write-host “ID: $($version.VersionLabel) – File: $itemName – Version Date: $versionDate”
write-host “Deleting”
$version.Delete()
write-host “Deleted”
}
#}
}
}

#For any versions that remain, they would want to keep only X number of versions (let’s say the last 20 versions)
$doclib.MajorVersionLimit = 20
$doclib.Update()

$enddate = get-date
write-host “Ended on: ” $enddate

Written 09/28/16