Every Cloud Storage Limit, In One Place

Every number on this page is published by the vendor. None of them are secret, none are hidden, and none required anything cleverer than reading the documentation.

They are simply scattered. The daily upload cap is in a Workspace administrator article. The path length is in a restrictions page written for SharePoint. The download ceiling is in a help topic about zip files. No vendor publishes its own limits in one table, and no vendor has any reason to.

So people meet them one at a time, by failing, usually in the middle of something urgent. This is that table.

How much you can move in a day

The 750 GB is the most consequential figure on this page, because it converts a bandwidth problem into a calendar problem. Three terabytes takes four days on any connection. Buying faster internet does not help.

Note the wording: upload and copy. Duplicating files that are already in Drive counts against it, even though nothing crosses your connection.

How large one file can be

The copy restriction is the odd one. A one-terabyte file can be stored but not duplicated in place, so making a second copy means a round trip through your own disk — and at 750 GB a day, that is a two-day operation for something your own hardware would do in minutes.

Names and paths

400, not 260. The famous number is the old Windows MAX_PATH, which is a different limit on a different thing. Quoting it leads people to believe they are safely under when they are not.

You can test a specific name against all of these at once with the name and path checker.

How much you can take out at once

The 10,000 file ceiling appears at two separate companies and catches people for the same reason: it sounds enormous and a single phone camera roll clears it. Dropbox is explicit that nested files count toward the same total, so splitting by top-level folder often does not help.

Both ceilings apply to browser downloads. The desktop sync clients are not bound by them, which is the single most useful workaround on this page and the one least often mentioned.

How long deleted things survive

Three products, four clocks, and none of them displayed anywhere while they run. No trash folder shows a countdown, and nothing emails you on day 25.

The 30-versus-93 gap is worth committing to memory if you use both kinds of account: on a work OneDrive you have three months, on a personal one you have a month, and the interface is identical.

What counts toward your quota

Two of these routinely waste people's afternoons. Clearing shared folders frees nothing, because they were never yours. And the compressed photo backup setting is no longer free — that changed, a great deal of surviving advice has not, and switching to it slows how fast you fill up rather than stopping it.

What we could not verify

Published for the same reason we publish it on every page: a reference that claims to be complete is a reference you should distrust.

• Whether file version history counts toward quota on any of these services, and whether deleting a file removes its versions.
• How long quota recalculation takes after a deletion — none of them publish a figure.
• Whether Dropbox publishes any upload size or daily cap. Absence of a documented limit is not the same as an absence of a limit.
• Whether a second-stage recycle bin exists on every OneDrive work tenant, and for how long.
• Whether third-party migration tools are bound by the same 750 GB per-user ceiling.

Using this before you need it

The value of a table like this is entirely in reading it early.

Before a migration, check the daily cap against your volume and turn it into a number of days. Before an export, check the file count against the download ceilings. Before you delete anything you are unsure about, check which clock you are on.

The transfer planner does the first two automatically if you would rather enter numbers than read tables. And when something has already gone wrong, the fix reports work through each symptom with the test that identifies which of these limits you have actually hit.