June 2025 Microsoft OneDrive File Path/Name Length Limit Change Deleted my Videos and Reverted my Word Documents to old Versions, all without telling me

Hayden Macpherson 5 Reputation points
2025-07-29T05:30:20.8066667+00:00

Roughly a couple months ago when I was saving an image from the web to my computer, it said the file path was too long and the image had to be renamed. However I could not rename or even delete the image. Then out of the blue OneDrive desynched and resynced all my files, flagging up errors of other images file paths being too long, forcing me to rename them. Over the month or so since then I noticed several image/video files missing and also that most of my word documents had been rolled back to previous versions, deleting huge amounts of content that had been added since then. This is a catatastrophic failure on the part of OneDrive, a service which is supposed to back up and secure your files, but instead has been deleting them! This is totally unacceptable, especially given I pay for this service.

When I contacted Microsoft support they were worse than useless, the inevitable outsourced/offshored workers just spamming chunks of boilerplate text, not adressing Microsoft's file path/name length limit that caused this in the first place at all. But instead telling me to do all kinds of things to recover the files or roll back OneDrive, as if I had deliberately deleted/reverted them, and then when that didn't work, for the obvious reason that it was not I who deleted these files or reverted these documents in the first place, telling me they were sorry but couldn't help me and closing the case.

Has anyone had this issue with the file path length limit change recently? The bottom line is OneDrive is obviously not a safe place to store my files. Can anyone reccommend any alternatives? It's annoying because I use Microsoft Word extensively and it's all integrated with Windows File Explorer and your Microsoft account and so on.

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | Windows

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  1. Edward Schlobohm01 10,215 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2025-08-05T17:40:15.04+00:00

    Hi Hayden,

    Thanks for reaching out to the Microsoft Community and sharing all the details about your OneDrive path name length issues, let me share this information with you, that a few others are running into the same problem with OneDrive's file path length.

    According to Microsoft's official advice, if your file paths go over 400 characters, you might face sync issues. When OneDrive tries to resync or rename these files, it could lead to data loss or even roll back to previous versions—especially if autosave or version history doesn't catch the latest changes. Unfortunately, you can't get around the 400-character limit in OneDrive itself.

    Office applications like Word and Excel don't handle long paths, even if Windows does.

    There's no official way to bypass this limit without reorganizing your files.

    This could mean reverting Word documents to older versions or losing recent edits.

    You can check out this article: 'Path of this file or folder is too long' error in OneDrive, https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/-path-of-this-file-or-folder-is-too-long-error-in-onedrive-52bce0e7-b09d-4fc7-bfaa-079a647e0f6b

    Hope this helps!

    Warm regards,

    Edward Schlobohm

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