Drafts Size Limit Exceeded

I’m testing workflows with Drafts to see what I should do and not do with the app. I use Sublime Text and Drafts for plain text needs. I tried pasting 16,472 lines (1,489,923 characters) into a draft, and this notification window appeared.

  1. Will this be the limit forever with Drafts based on how the app is built or is it a limitation for now and there could possibly be room for more text-per-draft as the app evolves?

  2. Does anyone know the maximum limit per draft?

The current max. size limit is 900,000 characters. That is likely to say in place, at least for the short term.

This limit is largely imposed because of limits in Apple’s CloudKit, which underlies Drafts sync. A single record stored in CloudKit has a max. size of 1 MB. There are ways around this using asset types, but those create some other complexities that we decided were best to avoid with Drafts being optimized around shorter note type texts.

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This is great to know, and I totally get what you mean with these limitations. Thanks for explaining, so I can better plan how to use the app.

I once pasted a big chunk of XML into Drafts. Working with it was VERY slow.

I’m not complaining but until extreme scalability is achieved I wouldn’t want the limit raised.

Performance with large texts can depend on a number of things. You were probably on iOS, where the memory limitations are a big problem rendering large chunks of text with syntax highlighting. Those limits are not much of a problem on Mac, and when they are on iOS, you can always switch the draft to “Plain text” syntax which essentially disables syntax highlighting and it will perform much better.

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Yes. It was the iOS thing.

And you never DID advertise Drafts as for bulk text items.

I have an extended question – I use drafts as entrance to larger files stored (Icloud,dropbox). Is there a limit to size of those files – say I am pulling them in by a script into a variable, appending or whatever, then writing back. Does that script variable have the same limitations as a Draft?

Oh, I just ran a simple build exercise, appending > 100,000 characters at a time (simple text/markdown). I never reached a max variable size or script breakdown in my looping 50 times, but I did build a variable of 50,000,000 (50Mb) length, which wrote to Icloud. So, I suppose it might be device-RAM emory related.

Those limits are just limits of draft storage. You should not have similar limits within the JavaScript environment.

While there is a single draft size limit, as was noted earlier, is there a known limit to how large (or how many) individual drafts can be saved within the app on iOS? Is there a point where the app reaches a maximum and drafts would need to be exported/deleted, or archived? My apologies if this is an already answered question. I couldn’t find reference to this so far. Thanks!

More or less addressed here:

Generally, the limit is your iCloud storage - but as plain text, drafts don’t use that much space.

Excellent. Thanks for the quick answer and I assume this holds true for Drafts on iOS, not just the desktop app.

They are all stored in the same place across the platforms.

These days the latest iPad’s are clocking in at laptop speeds, so I don’t think having the resources to handle lots of Drafts drafts is going to cause any serious headaches on iOS/iPadOS in the foreseeable future.

Fantastic! Thanks for confirming, much appreciated.

Hi has this limit increased or decreased at all recently? Just curious. Thanks.

Are you asking specifically about the size limit of individual drafts? No, the 900k character limit has not, and is not likely to, change. Drafts is optimized around handling many smaller drafts.

That was my question thanks