Notebook autosave fails due to file size limits

Learn what to do when your Databricks notebook fails to autosave due to file size limits.

Written by Adam Pavlacka

Last published at: May 16th, 2022

Problem

Notebook autosaving fails with the following error message:

Failed to save revision: Notebook size exceeds limit. This is most commonly caused by cells with large results. Remove some cells or split the notebook.

Cause

The maximum notebook size allowed for autosaving is 8 MB.

Solution

First, check the size of your notebook file using your browser’s developer tools.

In Chrome, for example, click View > Developer > Developer Tools. Click the Network tab and view the Size column for the notebook file.

Notebook size.

Then, there are two possible solutions:

  1. You can manually save notebooks up to 32 MB.
  2. You can reduce the size of your notebook by hiding large results.

Graphing tools like plotly and matplotlib can generate large sets of results that display as large images. You can reduce the notebook size by hiding these large results and images.