Update 2014-11-24 – I’ve just had another conversation as well as testing on my two tenants with Marc (they’ve done internal testing against other tenants as well). They have a script they are going to be running this week (or as long as it takes) on all effected tenants to fix the bug as well as fix any videos you’ve already uploaded and have this problem with. Marc informed me it is going to take a little while to run against all the tenants, however, they are working to figure out a way to speed up the script to get this resolved faster. So, if you know you have this issue, sit tight and your tenant will be fixed soon. If you want to see if the fix has hit your tenant yet, just edit and save a video and recheck your used storage. If it remains the same, you have the fix. If it grows, you don’t have the fix yet, but not to worry, once the fix hits your tenant the storage consumed will drop down to what it should be. A big thanks and congrats to the Office 365 Video Portal team for their quick response and for coming up with a resolution to this issue so quickly! Hopefully it will be fixed across all effected tenants this week!

Update 2014-11-21 – In the comments below as well as on Twitter, I have received updates on this bug from the O365 Video Portal team. Marc: “We figured out the issue and are working on a fix. It was that we had versioning for files turned on. So it was making a copy of the video every time you edit the meta-data.” and via Twitter “…Working on a fix and way to fix up existing content.”

Original Post
I’m working on a blog post about my first experience with, and using the new Office 365 Video Portal. However, in playing with the portal and writing that post I found what is in my opinion a huge bug within the Portal. So, I wanted to get this out to alert both you and also hopefully MS to the issue. The long and short of it is avoid the Edit and Save buttons on a video! Every time you click save, it appears to create an additional copy of the video in your site collection, taking away from your quota. I uploaded two videos, approximately 250MB each. Initially it only took up 500MB of my site collection quota as expected. However, in playing around, you can see I’ve quickly grown my used storage from 500MB to 2.29GB, just by clicking Edit and then Save. You don’t even need to make a change to the title or description, just two clicks of the mouse. Oh, and by the way, you can’t even click save after the initial upload and processing or you’ll start with double the size right off the bat! So you better be happy with the name of the video file you upload b/c that will be the name given to video on upload :).

  1. Click the Edit Button
    https://qz92ww.dm2301.livefilestore.com/y2pZFfOoOh8IMXQ8nsujmk6XDN_2_s2PX5tsWENugqlCb-T-4_rHZsUeAb3IbTTwN9XBGk6gR4wdYWSHjVv9Aqol-D6AifpT1HQkAvLkSLFiL8/EditButton.png

  2. Click the Save Button
    https://qz92ww.dm2301.livefilestore.com/y2pMJVsLuZlMI3UNdEglxHGzoSsFOcuSUgBqg4hDptgjMa2SJF6NJsS_koNw4dp7qM-Z6F6nro8lffxyAqai54KIGhgqVgWBX77jWQD4VF0of0/SaveButton.png

  3. Watch your site collection grow
    Before a single Edit/Save Click
    https://qz92ww.dm2301.livefilestore.com/y2pncr9F7LXSGmT3_B9_fCDnCOHWCfQfuYz9rh50Uoqg_TLCxFSPiHAMHeOnqP4D1rcl8dbkgGaNtaZP5-lPgCtykPIWYoMpEUqLGdzqZwHxgk/BeforeClicks.png
    After a single Edit/Save Click
    https://qz92ww.dm2301.livefilestore.com/y2ptrJZe0BQ8fjxVWZzhu3esLGbQ5Rfp3aDyi4_48cW8N-umjILrQzpaJ6bw-i2-aAT_7-unaGhht8-Vcfnjo8h0EdAgKkWLe33hfBPaE2-dVc/AfterClicks.png

The Good News? If you delete a video, it deletes all the copies of it. You just don’t know which video someone went Edit/Save crazy on and is taking all the space in your site collection. Or even if someone went Edit/Save crazy and your site collection it bloated, or is actually the correct size for all the videos you have in it.

The only thing I don’t know is if old videos will be purged after a period of time. However, even if this is the case it could cause problems if you have lots of video and people are editing titles and descriptions or even just clicking around. You could easily hit your O365 storage quota and then have ot wait for videos to be purged before you can do anything else…if they even get purged after a period of time.

So there it is…consider yourselves warned and informed.