Google Drive Stopped Uploading: The 750 GB Wall
A large upload runs for hours, then stops with nothing useful on screen. Usually it is a documented daily ceiling nobody mentions until you hit it.
The symptom
A large upload or copy runs for hours and then stops. Retrying does nothing, or works briefly and stops again. There is no useful error.
Work down this list, not through it
Ordered by how often it turns out to be the cause. Run the check in the middle column before you change anything — each one takes under a minute, and it tells you whether that row is your problem or not.
| Cause | Confirm it’s this one | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| You hit the 750 GB daily ceiling Most common on big transfers | Add up what has uploaded in the last 24 hours. If it is near 750 GB, this is it - and the clock is rolling, not a calendar day. | Wait for the window to clear and resume. Plan the rest in sub-750 GB batches you have listed in advance. Google: "Each user can upload and copy 750 GB to Drive within 24 hours." |
| A single file is over 750 GB and you are copying it Rare but instantly fatal | Check the size of the largest file in the set. | Download it and upload it instead of copying. Google states this outright as the workaround. Google: "Files larger than 750 GB can't be copied. Instead, download the file and then upload it." |
| A single file is over the 5 TB maximum Rare | Check whether any file exceeds 5 TB. | Split the file. No plan accepts a larger one. Google documents a maximum individual file size of up to 5 TB. |
| Thousands of small files rather than a size problem Very common, misread as slowness | Divide total GB by file count. Under about 1 MB average and the bottleneck is per-file overhead, not bandwidth. | Archive small files into a handful of larger ones before uploading, then unpack at the other end. Not a documented limit - this is arithmetic. Each file carries its own setup cost regardless of size. |
| The account is out of storage Common and often misdiagnosed | Open the storage page and read the number. Remember trash still counts toward it. | Clear space or buy more. Uploads stop entirely when quota is reached. Google states trashed items count against your storage limit until permanently cleared. |
| Your upload speed, not their limit Underestimated constantly | Run a speed test and look at the upload figure, not the download one. | Recalculate the schedule against the real number. Nothing to fix, but plenty to re-plan. Not a vendor limit. Consumer connections are asymmetric, and upload is usually a fraction of download. |
There is a particular kind of failure that resists all troubleshooting, and this is the clearest example in consumer cloud storage.
Nothing is broken. No setting is wrong. Your connection is fine, your account is fine, the software is behaving exactly as designed. You have simply met a number, and no amount of restarting, reinstalling or upgrading will move it.
Why bandwidth does not help
This is the part that changes how you plan.
Most transfer problems get better with a faster connection. This one does not. If you have 3 TB to move and the ceiling is 750 GB a day, the job takes four days on fibre and four days on a leased line. The constraint is the policy, not the pipe.
So the money that would go on faster upload should go on planning instead. Four deliberate batches, listed in advance, reconciled at the end. That costs nothing and is the difference between a migration that completes and one that quietly leaves a gap.
Copies count, which surprises everyone
Google's wording is "upload and copy". Both draw on the same 750 GB.
That matters in a case people never expect: reorganising data that is already in Drive. Moving 2 TB from a personal Drive into a shared drive involves no internet transfer at all from your point of view — the bytes never leave Google — and it still stops at 750 GB.
The same applies to server-side transfers between accounts. If you are migrating a team and assuming it will run overnight because nothing touches your office connection, it will not.
The file too big to copy but not to store
There is an odd asymmetry worth knowing if you work with large media or disk images.
The maximum individual file is up to 5 TB. But Google states that files larger than 750 GB cannot be copied, and directs you to download and re-upload instead.
So a 1 TB file can live in Drive perfectly happily, and cannot be duplicated inside it. To make a second copy you must pull the whole terabyte down to a local disk and push it back up — which, at 750 GB a day, is a two-day round trip for an operation that would take seconds on your own hardware.
Nothing warns you about this before you organise your archive around large single files.
When it is not the limit at all
Two causes on the table above are not Google's doing, and both get blamed on it.
Small files. Divide your total size by your file count. If the average is under a megabyte, bandwidth is not your bottleneck — per-file overhead is. Forty thousand documents totalling 30 GB can take longer than a single 200 GB video. Archiving them into a handful of larger files first is unglamorous and can turn days into hours.
Your actual upload speed. Run a speed test and look at the second number. Domestic connections are asymmetric by design, and a 500 Mbps package may offer 30 Mbps up. At 30 Mbps, 750 GB takes about 55 hours — meaning you will never reach the daily cap, and the ceiling you are hitting is your own line.
Reconcile, because nothing else will
The real danger in a batched transfer is not failure. It is partial success that looks complete.
An upload that stopped at the ceiling and an upload that finished look identical in a folder listing. Nobody counts forty thousand files by eye, so the gap gets discovered months later by someone looking for a specific document.
Record the file count and total size at the source before you start, and check both at the destination when you think you are done. If the numbers disagree, you have a gap and you still have the original to fix it from.
To see which limits a transfer of your size will meet before you begin, including the download side, put your numbers into the transfer planner.
If it is still broken
- Count the files at both ends before concluding the transfer finished. A stopped upload looks identical to a finished one.
- If you are batching, split on something that cannot move - fixed date ranges or folder names, never anything relative to today.
- Add the batch counts together and check the total against the source. A gap found now costs an afternoon; a gap found next year costs the files.
- For transfers between two cloud providers, remember the 750 GB applies to copies as well as uploads, so a server-side transfer is not exempt.
- If uploads fail well below any of these limits, test with a single small file to separate an account problem from a volume problem.
What we could not verify
- Whether the 750 GB window is a strict rolling 24 hours or resets at a fixed time.
- Whether the limit is applied per account or per authenticated client during a transfer.
- Whether third-party migration services are subject to the same per-user ceiling.
- What Google shows in the interface, if anything, at the moment the limit is reached.
Open questions rather than criticisms. Where the vendor does not publish an answer we say so instead of filling the gap with a plausible guess, because a confident wrong answer is worse here than no answer.
Questions people ask
What is the Google Drive daily upload limit?
750 GB. Google documents that each user can upload and copy 750 GB to Drive within 24 hours. Once reached, further uploads and copies stop until the window clears. It is a hard ceiling with no documented way to raise it.
How do I upload more than 750 GB to Google Drive?
Across more than one day, deliberately. Split the work into batches that each stay under the ceiling, write down which batch contains what, and reconcile the counts at the end. The important discipline is splitting on something stable - a fixed folder list rather than anything relative to the current date, so a batch cannot shift between runs.
Why is my Google Drive upload so slow when my internet is fast?
Two usual reasons. Consumer connections are asymmetric, so the upload speed is often a small fraction of the advertised download speed. And a great many small files cost far more than their size suggests, because each one carries its own setup cost - twenty thousand documents will take dramatically longer than one file of the same total size.
Can I pay to raise the 750 GB limit?
No tier, setting or support request that raises it is documented. This is worth knowing before a migration, because the natural assumption is that a business plan removes consumer-grade caps. Here it does not, and the schedule has to absorb it.
Does the limit apply to copying files as well as uploading?
Yes - Google's wording is "upload and copy", so both count against the same 750 GB. That catches people reorganising a large Drive or copying between shared drives, where no data leaves Google at all and the ceiling still applies.
Where this information comes from
Product details change often. Each item below links to the primary source we checked, so you can confirm anything that matters to your decision.
Vendors change limits and interfaces without announcing it. If a step here no longer matches what you see, tell us and we will re-check it.