Understanding Storage Limits in Canvas
Now that we have been in Canvas for four years now at FSCJ, we are all becoming more comfortable teaching our courses and adding more content within them. As content is being added, however, do you know how much storage remains available in your Canvas course or your personal files? This post will explain what those quotas are and how to best manage your storage in Canvas.
Canvas Personal Storage
Canvas Personal Storage has a capacity of 50MB (Megabytes) and once you hit that maximum capacity, Canvas will not allow you to upload further files or attachments. Your personal storage consists of attachments to your Inbox, any ungraded assignments, discussions, and submission comments. This storage area cap can sneak up on many people, so it’s important to know how to manage your personal storage.
Inbox Attachments
As the sender or Inbox messages, any attachment will contribute to your total personal storage capacity. Please note that if you’re receiving attachments in your Inbox, this does not count toward your personal storage capacity.
BEST PRACTICES
To attach files without hindrance, we recommend using your FSCJ Microsoft OneDrive and linking the file in the Inbox message. This will avoid issues with sending files to colleagues or students.
Ungraded Discussions, Assignments, or Submission Comments
When a student or instructor attaches a file to their discussion post or to an assignment submission that is not graded, it contributes directly to their personal storage. This also includes any feedback in the submission comments for both instructors and students.
BEST PRACTICES
There are two ways to work around this capacity issue in the ungraded arena.
Attach your file submission to your Microsoft OneDrive account and link the file, instead of directly attaching it to the assignment.
Create a graded assignment and set the points to zero, this will act as an ungraded assignment and circumvent the capacity issue. All submissions that are in the graded category do not contribute to your personal storage quota.
Files Directly Uploaded to Personal Storage
Although this one is fairly obvious, any files that are directly uploaded to your personal storage area will contribute to your overall capacity.
BEST PRACTICES
As silly as it may sound, the best practice here would simply be not to upload your personal files in Canvas. The personal files area is not intended as a storage area and is meant as a temporary means to host files to send attachments in and attach to ungraded assignments. We instead recommend you upload it to OneDrive, where there is a much higher quota.
Canvas Group Storage
When a group is created for the students, they receive their own personal workspace that includes announcements, pages, files, discussions, and collaborations, and this is housed separately from the course. As such, this means that the students have a separate capacity apart from their personal and course storage. Canvas Group Storage has a capacity of 50MB, which can sneak up on student groups incredibly quickly in maximum storage capacity.
BEST PRACTICES
If you are running into storage issues within groups, students can also have a collaborative space by using the Collaborations tool. This allows them to work together within Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents. The Collaborations tool files do not contribute to personal or course storage, but instead to the student’s OneDrive storage which is over 1TB (1000GB).
On this note, instructors can still encourage students to use the Discussion board space, but please let them know that any files attached to their respective discussions go toward their personal storage.
Canvas Course Storage
Canvas Course Storage has a capacity of 1 GB (1000 MB) and largely consists of physical files being housed within your course. This can deviate from files that are uploaded as a resource in your modules, all the way to an image being housed in your Quiz.
Graded Discussions and Assignments Submissions
This is a fun fact! Although our ungraded discussions and assignments contribute to our personal storage when attachments are added, graded discussion and assignments contribute to general storage, thus not contributing to our course storage at all!
Files, Quizzes, Assignments, and Beyond
All files that are uploaded to the Files area in your course contribute to your Course Storage. There are no exceptions to excuse a file from the course storage in the Files area.
Additionally, any files or attachments that instructors add from the Rich Content Editor areas (Assignments, Quizzes, Discussions, and so forth) will be housed in the Files area upon upload. Meaning that even though the file is showing in your assignment, deleting the file on the assignment does not fully remove it and to remove it from counting against your quota, it would have to be removed from the Files area where it is actually housed.
BEST PRACTICES
When uploading content into the Rich Content Editor, you are allowed to upload video files, however, we strongly recommend that you do not. Instead, use Canvas Studio for your media storage option which can house all of the non-copyright audio and video content that you desire. The big difference here is that Studio does not have a data cap, as opposed to the course capacity size of only 1GB (which for video, fills up very quickly).
The other big file that can take easily up a lot of space is PowerPoint, we have an entire article talking about best practices with this file type which you can refer to below.