Uploading file

[tagreer1]

I have been using Canvas for years and for the past 24 hours it has been unable to perform basic functions such as uploading files or links from my computer. It begins the operation but then it stalls, gives a "Wait or Stop" prompt and, when you click "wait," nothing happens. Of course, I restarted Canvas and then restarted my computer several times. Still nothing. 

Does anyone have a work around? Thanks.

[James · Accepted solution]

@tagreer1 

Are you running a self-hosted version of Canvas? You said that you restarted Canvas, but I'm not sure if you meant closed the browser and restarted it or actually restarted the server because you're running as self-hosted version.

I can say that I'm not experiencing that issue. I just uploaded 300+ files last night by dragging/dropping them into the upload screen. We're using the Instructure hosted solution and it seems to be working properly.

Here are some things to check.

It could be a third-party cookie issue. Canvas still uses them but the browsers are trying to do away with them for privacy and security reasons. Modern browsers might be blocking them. In Chrome, there is an eyeball to the right of the URL and if there is a slash through it, that means that third-party cookies are getting blocked. I've manually added some of the Canvas sites to my allow list, but now Chrome has this thing where you can temporarily allow cookies for that website for 3 months by clicking the eye icon. It may be that you did it 90 days ago and it just now started back but you don't remember.

It could be a file quota. Unless your institution has set different values, the default quotas are 500 MB per course and 50 MB per user. To check a course quota, go to the Files menu for the course. At the bottom of the screen will be a quota progress bar with text. After uploading my files last night, I'm now at 8% of 524.3 MB used. To check your personal quota, go to your Account from the global navigation menu and then choose Files. I'm at 4% of my 52.4 MB there.

If you upload a lot of media (video or audio), you can exceed the quota faster than you think. We had to do remote learning this last week and a 25 minute lecture was 245MB. That's half of my quota for just one course. Large files like that should be stored elsewhere -- we have Canvas Studio, but there are other video sharing solutions like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. (these are not recommendations and the list is incomplete). Your school may have a preferred solution.

If you are the Canvas administrator and running a self-hosted version, then you may have ran out of hard drive space.

There's also a limit on the number and size of files that can be uploaded at one time. The specs can be found in the link I provided, but you can only upload a file of up to 5GB in size and 50 files at a time. So if you were trying to drag 300 files into the same folder, that might cause some issues (my 300 were spread out across 10 folders and some of them might have had more than 50 and I still think it took them).

If it is a quota issue, then you will need to delete some files before you can upload more.

If those doesn't work, I would then try a different browser or perhaps an incognito mode in Chrome (Ctrl+N) or a private window in Firefox (Ctrl+P). It might be a browser extension that is causing the problem.

If you're running Windows, I would make sure that you have applied any updates before restarting the computer. I've noticed that when I have pending updates that things start acting wonky.

It could have been a temporary network glitch. Normally those don't last 24 hours, so I suspect something else.

There are other things to check, but those are where I would start. Hopefully one of them is the solution.