Hans Brender's Blog

Now she’s fallen. The 15 GB file upload size.

File upload size

In the past, the maximum size for both OneDrive (Personal) and OneDrive for Business/ SharePoint Online was limited to 15 GB. A new limit was announced at Microsoft Ignite 2019 in Orlando.

100 GB

Well, the question I’m asking here A single file this size? Well, maybe CAD files. Or complex iso files. Or … So the world may well need that. But we must not forget what that means. Because a locally generated file must be moved through the Internet upload bottleneck of the respective provider. And here in Germany most contracts are based on asymmetrical connections.  The bottom line is that, yes, it works, but only at a snail’s pace.

And at first the users of OneDrive Personal were allowed to experiment with it.
They only have 5 GB free memory. So it’s not for you. Or buy additional memory.

Business users were still excluded. Whoever had a file larger than 15 GB in OneDrive for Business / SharePoint Online was faced with an error message:

This is the error message you get when the limit in your Office 365 Tenant is still 15 GB.

However, Microsoft has announced that the new 100 GB limit will be rolled out and available globally by June 2020.

First of all, you do not have a file > 15 GB at hand?
Can be created. On a command line.

fsutil file createnew <filename> <file size in byte>

So I quickly created a 20 GB file. And I tried again and again if the limit was lowered. As I said, it already worked in OneDrive Personal.

and in OneDrive for Business?

You have to be patient. This time I didn’t get an error message when I copied the file to a folder in OneDrive for Business.

And today I did not receive an error message. And then I had to wait, but it took quite a while until this file was synchronized to the cloud (400 MBit down, 40 MBit up == 70 minutes… And that was only 20 GByte. With 100 GByte it takes about 6 hours.

Summary:

It’s nice that we can now synchronize items larger than 15 GB to OneDrive for Business. However, we still have to wait a little until applications with different synchronization are available. I’m curious to see which CAD product will be the first to make it. Because that would also make sense.