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Håvard Meling's avatar
Håvard Meling
Copper Contributor
Jun 21, 2017

Migrated files much larger in SharePoint Online than on disk

I am doing some migration testing and I am surprised how much larger files are when uploaded to SharePoint Online. I uploaded roughly 80GB of office files, which resulted in maxing out the storage limit I had set for the sitecollection at 200GB. Some files are triple their original size and I have checked there is only one version. The "storman.aspx" also reports larger size than the Version history. The files were uploaded using a SPOMigrationPackage. Any ideas why the files are so much larger?

10 Replies

  • chrisvanz's avatar
    chrisvanz
    Copper Contributor

    Håvard Meling did you ever find a solution to this issue?  I am having exactly the same problem and can't find a solution.  I have just migrated all our data across to SharePoint - just normal Office files in Word and Excel, PDF files and some images.  Almost every file I uploaded has a much bigger file size online than it does on the local disk.  I have a backup/synch application that I wanted to use to keep an offline backup but when I analyse changes between my locally synched SharePoint sites with the original files on a hard disk, they are all same dates/times/names - but totally different file sizes.  Any pointers you can give to an explanation greatly appreciated.

    • Paul de Jong's avatar
      Paul de Jong
      Iron Contributor

      chrisvanz 
      did you compare a file before and after uploading?
      For Office files I would simply open the file with a zip tool to see the different components (e.g. xml files, images, ...). For binary files I would suggest to use the online tool https://hexed.it/

      Some small changes are expected for msg and Office files but they should be in the order of 10 kB's.

      Paul | SLIM Applications

  • administrator's avatar
    administrator
    Brass Contributor

    Small increases (e.g. 10 kB for msg files) are expected but this is extreme.
    I have only seen this increase for compressed tiff files where the size sometimes increases 5 folder upon uploading (SharePoint uncompresses the tiff, inserts metadata and then applies a much less efficient compression mechanism).
    I would compare the contents of the pptx before and after uploading. rename the extension to zip and then unpack the file. This should provide information what is going on.

    Paul

      • Patrick Reilly's avatar
        Patrick Reilly
        Copper Contributor

        I have discovered the exact same issue... 200kB word docs have grown after sharepoint upload to 1.4MB files! There are no extra 'versions' that I can see, just the document itself; It is exactly as you have shown. I uploaded simply by syncing a folder on my desktop to the site library.

        Did you happen to find out what is going on?

  • From where are you uploading your files: File System? Of course this is not normal behavior and it's totally unexpected

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