OneDrive for Business Restrictions and Limitations

Owned by
Mike Grosshandler
Last updated: Sep 01, 2022
2 min read

There are some restrictions and limitations to what you can store and/or sync with your OneDrive for Business Library.

  • Files stored in OneDrive for Business can be at most 100 GB (increased as of June 2020)

  • Up to 1TB of data can be stored.  (You can only sync as much data to your computer as you have available space on your hard drive.)

  • The following characters in file names aren't supported:

    \     /     :     *     ?     "     <     >     |    #     %

    Additionally, a file name that begins with a tilde (~) isn't supported.

To find and replace invalid characters that may be in your file and folder names locally that you cannot sync to the cloud, you can use a third-party tool such as Bulk Rename Utility. 

  • If you have more than 100,000 files, sync can take a long time.

To determine how many items are in your OneDrive Library, open your OneDrive for Business folder in Windows Explorer, select all (Control-a or Edit > Select All), right-click, and select Properties.  The pop-up window will tell you how many Files and Folders are in the selection. 

  • There is a 255 character limit for the full path of files synced with the OneDrive Sync client, which includes the site name, folders, personal site location and library name and the name of the file.

While the actual file path limit is 255, the path on the local drive needs to be smaller - around 190 - but could be as little as 180, depending on your username.

255 -  (60 + the length of your username) ("livealbany-my.sharepoint.com/personal/username_albany_edu/Documents/") = characters available for your file name and folder path length

For example, if your username is JLonglastname, then your OneDrive for Business path would be "livealbany-my.sharepoint.com/personal/jlonglastname_albany_edu/Documents/", which is 73 characters long.  255 - 73 = 182 characters left for your actual file and folder names.

If you would like to check your library to see if it would fit, you could use a third-party tool such as Path Length Checker to determine the length of your folder paths. 

For more information, see Microsoft's documentation: