How many Folders and Nested Folders can be created in SharePoint Online library

Question

Hi Team
We are doing file share migration from onprem to SPO .Hence would like to know how many Folders and Nested Folders can be created in SharePoint Online library .

Is there any limitation ?

Thanks in advance !

Answer 1

@Dhamley

According to this article, SharePoint Online has a limit of 30 million files and folders per library (Sum of folders and files). In each folder, it can contain 5000 files and folders (Sum of folders and files).

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Answer 2

Hi

check out this article:

https://natechamberlain.com/2021/12/04/sharepoint-online-file-and-item-limits-size-quantity-nested-folders-and-more/

The author has stated that he tested with 30 levels of nested folders with no issues.

This article also looks at the differences between folders and libraries, and recommendations for the structure of both:

https://sharepointmaven.com/should-i-create-a-folder-or-a-library-on-a-sharepoint-site/

If this is primarily used for File Storage, you could look at Azure Files as an alternative.

Hope this helps,

Thanks

Michael Durkan

• If the reply was helpful please upvote and/or accept as answer as this helps others in the community with similar questions. Thanks!

Answer 3

The answer to this question should be 'none.' While nested folders work really well in an NTFS file share environment, they are actually a hindrance in SPO. Here's what I mean...when the search crawler comes around your SPO library with many nested folders, it ignores the folder names. So, folders are inherently not searchable. Think of the 'depth' of nesting folders and try to turn those folders into a 'flat' list of column headers or 'metadata' about each document. Each column header is searchable metadata, so it makes more sense to create a library with more columns than folders...