Limits in eDiscovery (Premium)
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This article describes the limits in the Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Premium) solution in Microsoft Purview.
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Case and review set limits
The following table lists the limits for cases and review sets in eDiscovery (Premium).
| Description of limit | Classic Case Limit | New Case Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Total number of documents that can be added to a case (for all review sets in a case). | 3 million | 40 million |
| Total file size per load set. This includes loading non-Office 365 into a review set. | 300 GB | 1 TB |
| Maximum number of load sets per case. | 200 | 200 |
| Maximum number of review sets per case. | 20 | 20 |
| Maximum number of tag groups per case. | 1,000 | 1,000 |
| Maximum number of unique tags per case. | 1,0001 | 1,0001 |
Collection limits
The limits for the Export as report and the export results are as follows:
| Description of limit | Limit |
|---|---|
| Total items | 1 million |
| Total locations | 500,000 |
| Exported results (items) | 500,000 |
| Exported results (locations) | 100,000 |
Export limits
The limits described in this section are related to exporting documents out of a review set.
| Description of limit | Limit |
|---|---|
| Maximum size of a single export. | 5 million documents or 500 GB, whichever is smaller |
Hold limits
The following table lists the limits for holds associated with an eDiscovery (Premium) case.
| Description of limit | Limit |
|---|---|
| Maximum number of hold policies for an organization. This limit includes the combined total of hold policies in Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Standard) and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Premium) cases. |
10,0002 |
| Maximum number of mailboxes in a single case hold. This limit includes the combined total of user mailboxes, and the mailboxes associated with Microsoft 365 Groups, Microsoft Teams, and Viva Engage Groups. |
1,000 |
| Maximum number of sites in a single case hold. This limit includes the combined total of OneDrive for Business sites, SharePoint sites, and the sites associated with Microsoft 365 Groups, Microsoft Teams, and Viva Engage Groups. | 100 |
Indexing limits
The following table lists the indexing limits in eDiscovery (Premium).
| Description of limit | Limit |
|---|---|
| Maximum number of characters extracted from a single file. | 10 million3 |
| Maximum size of a single file. | 150 MB3 |
| Maximum depth of embedded items in a document. | 253 |
| Maximum size of files processed by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). | 24 MB3 |
| Maximum Advanced indexing throughput | 2 GB per hour |
Jobs limits
| Description of limit | Limit |
|---|---|
| Maximum number of concurrent jobs in your organization. | 100 |
| Maximum number of concurrent jobs that a single user can start at one time. | 50 |
| Maximum number of concurrent tenant-wide jobs (for example, tenant-wide searches) in your organization. | 50 |
| Maximum number of concurrent tenant-wide jobs (for example, tenant-wide searches) that a single user can start at one time. | 25 |
Review set download limits
| Description of limit | Limit |
|---|---|
| Total file size or maximum number of documents downloaded from a review set. | 3 MB or 50 documents6 |
Review set viewer limits
| Description of limit | Limit |
|---|---|
| Maximum number of items displayed per page in a review set. | 1,000 |
Note
Use default or custom filters to adjust the displayed items in a review set as needed.
Search limits
The limits described in this section are related to using the search tool on the Searches tab to collect data for a case. For more information, see Collect data for a case in eDiscovery (Premium).
| Description of limit | Limit |
|---|---|
| Maximum number of mailboxes or sites that can be searched in a single search. | No limit |
| Maximum number of searches that can run at the same time. | No limit |
| Maximum number of characters for a search query (including operators and conditions). | 10,0004 |
| Maximum number of characters for a search query for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business sites (including operators and conditions). | 10,000 4,000 with Wildcards4 |
| Minimum number of alpha characters for prefix wildcards; for example, one* or set*. | 3 |
| Maximum variants returned when using prefix wildcard to search for an exact phrase or when using a prefix wildcard and the NEAR Boolean operator. | 10,0005 |
| Maximum number of items per user mailbox that are displayed on preview page for searches. The newest items are displayed. | 100 |
| Maximum number of items from all mailboxes displayed on preview page for searches. | 1,000 |
| Maximum number of mailboxes that can be previewed for search results. If there are more than 1,000 mailboxes that contain items that match the search query, only the top 1,000 mailboxes with the most results are available for preview. | 1,000 |
| Maximum number of items from SharePoint and OneDrive for Business sites displayed on preview page for searches. The newest items are displayed. | 200 |
| Maximum number of SharePoint and OneDrive for Business sites that can be previewed for search results. If there are more than 200 sites that contain items that match the search query, only the top 200 sites with the most results are available for preview. | 200 |
| Maximum number of items per public folder mailbox displayed on preview page for searches. | 100 |
| Maximum number of items found in all public folder mailbox items displayed on preview page for searches. | 200 |
| Maximum number of public folder mailboxes that can be previewed for search results. If there are more than 500 public folder mailboxes that contain items that match the search query, only the top 500 mailboxes with the most results are available for preview. | 500 |
| The maximum size of an item that can be viewed on the sample page of a collection estimate. | 10,000,000 bytes (approximately 9.5 MB) |
Search times
Microsoft collects performance information for searches run by all organizations. While the complexity of the search query can impact search times, the biggest factor that affects how long searches take is the number of mailboxes searched. Although Microsoft doesn't provide a Service Level Agreement for search times, the following table lists average search times for collection searches based on the number of mailboxes included in the search.
| Number of mailboxes | Average search time |
|---|---|
| 100 | 30 seconds |
| 1,000 | 45 seconds |
| 10,000 | 4 minutes |
| 25,000 | 10 minutes |
| 50,000 | 20 minutes |
| 100,000 | 25 minutes |
Themes limits
The limits described in this section are related to manually defining the maximum number of themes in settings for a case.
| Description of limit | Limit |
|---|---|
| Minimum number of the maximum number of defined themes. | 3 |
| Maximum number of defined themes. | 10,000 |
Viewer limits
| Description of limit | Limit |
|---|---|
| Maximum size of Excel file that can be viewed in the native viewer. | 4 MB |
Need help with eDiscovery issues?
Check out the Resolve common eDiscovery issues article for basic troubleshooting steps that you can take to identify and resolve issues that you might encounter during an eDiscovery search or elsewhere in the eDiscovery process.
Reference notes
1 This is the maximum number of tags that you can create in a case. This limit isn't related to the number of documents that can be tagged.
2 When you put more than 1,000 mailboxes or 100 sites on hold in a single hold policy, the system will automatically scale the hold as needed. This means the system will automatically add data locations to multiple hold policies, instead of adding them to a single hold policy. However, the limit of 10,000 case hold policies per organization still applies.
3 Any item that exceeds a single file limit shows up as a processing error.
4 When searching SharePoint and OneDrive for Business locations, the characters in the URLs of the sites being searched count against this limit. The total number of characters consists of:
- All characters in both the Users and Filters fields.
- All search permissions filters that apply to the user.
- The characters from any location properties in the search, including ExchangeLocation, PublicFolderLocation, SharPointLocation, ExchangeLocationExclusion, PublicFolderLocationExclusion, SharePointLocationExclusion, and OneDriveLocationExclusion. For example, including all SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts in the search counts as six characters, as the word "ALL" will appear for both the SharePointLocation and OneDriveLocation field.
5 For non-phrase queries (a keyword value that doesn't use double quotation marks) we use a special prefix index. This tells us that a word occurs in a document, but not where it occurs in the document. To do a phrase query (a keyword value with double quotation marks), we need to compare the position within the document for the words in the phrase. This means that we can't use the prefix index for phrase queries. In this case, we internally expand the query with all possible words that the prefix expands to; for example, time* can expand to "time OR timer OR times OR timex OR time boxed OR ...". The limit of 10,000 is the maximum number of variants the word can expand to, not the number of documents matching the query. There's no upper limit for non-phrase terms.
6 This limit applies to downloading selected documents from a review set. It doesn't apply to exporting documents from a review set. For more information about downloading and exporting documents, see Export case data in eDiscovery (Premium).