Working around a 413 Request Entity Too Large issue with WebDAV

[Hullabaloo]

When uploading through the WebDAV interface on the NextCloud service I am using, I frequently receive the error '413 Request Entity Too Large' regardless of whether I am using rclone, WinSCP, or any other tool that works with WebDAV. So this problem may not have a solution.

Searching for this issue, I came across this on GitHub https://github.com/nextcloud/docker/issues/261 which seems to suggest that the max body size and body buffer size needs to be adjusted server-side.

Unfortunately, I believe the Scandinavian site operators do not speak English very well, as they didn't seem to understand the issue I'm having when I tried to explain it to them. (For the price, it wouldn't be reasonable to fuss too much.)

So my question is this, are there any settings I can tweak in rclone to try and work around this issue? I'm aware that, if there are, it'll hinder performance compared to using the NextCloud web interface or sync client, but mounting the remote filesystem through WebDAV allows me to perform tasks I would not otherwise be able to.

[ncw (Nick Craig-Wood)]

@Hullabaloo

When uploading through the WebDAV interface on the NextCloud service I am using, I frequently receive the error '413 Request Entity Too Large' regardless of whether I am using rclone, WinSCP, or any other tool that works with WebDAV. So this problem may not have a solution.

What do you think the size threshold is where things stop working?

I would guess the operators of the nextcloud have deliberately limited the max size of file.

@Hullabaloo

So my question is this, are there any settings I can tweak in rclone to try and work around this issue? I'm aware that, if there are, it'll hinder performance compared to using the NextCloud web interface or sync client, but mounting the remote filesystem through WebDAV allows me to perform tasks I would not otherwise be able to.

What you can do is use the chunker backend which will transparently break up large files into smaller ones.

You'll need to have an idea of what the file size limit is though.

[Hullabaloo]

There is no file size limit on the web interface, I uploaded an 8GB file. I can't even get 50MB in with the WebDAV interface.

I can try the chunker backend and see how that works out.

[Ajaja (Alex)]

BTW, 50Mb filesize is the default limit in Windows for WebDAV interface too.

[asdffdsa (jojothehumanmonkey)]

have you seen this?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2668751/you-cannot-download-more-than-50-mb-or-upload-large-files-when-the-upl
and
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/900900/folder-copy-error-message-when-downloading-a-file-that-is-larger-than

[ncw (Nick Craig-Wood)]

@Hullabaloo

There is no file size limit on the web interface, I uploaded an 8GB file. I can't even get 50MB in with the WebDAV interface.

Hmm, that has got to be a misconfiguration on the WebDAV server I think. 50MB is a very low limit. I thought you were going to say something like 1GB! Which service provider are you using? Do you know which WebDAV server they are using? If you do say rclone lsf webdav: -vv --dump headers it should give you a clue in the header lines.