The URL is invalid. It may refer to a nonexistent file or folder, or refer to a valid file or folder that is not in the current Web – how to fix

In this post we describe an issue observed within a SharePoint 2010 environment where files could not be uploaded or edited and users received a “nonexistent file or folder” message, plus explain how to resolve.

The problem

Reports started coming in from users that when they tried to upload files or edit properties within a single site collection they received the following error message:

*The URL is invalid. It may refer to a nonexistent file or folder, or refer to a valid file or folder that is not in the current Web.*

Over the course of a couple of days, the changed and instead of seeing the above error the window would just hang when uploading files/ editing properties and users would see a “processing” message:

*Processing message appears and does nothing when users upload files/ edit properties.*

In this example, there is one, very large document library that was most affected by this issue within the site collection. So the first thing I did was take a look at the files with no checked in version within the document library settings.

I found that there was close to 1000 files with no checked in version. When trying to open the checked out files page it took an age until finally opening. I was unable to take ownership of all of the files and check them in, but this didn’t make any difference to the issue.

We have set up nightly IIS resets on our web front end servers so overnight this took place in the hopes restarting the web services might help, but this also didn’t fix anything.

The solution

After the IIS reset, I began looking into the SQL server too see if space was the issue. Sure enough I found that one of the drives that hosted the content database related to the site collection in question had less than 10MB free space!

So for us the solution was a simple one, we increased the space on the full drive and the issue went away. Users are once again able to upload files/ edit properties within the site collection.

Other common suggested fixes to try

In writing this post, I researched many of the other suggested fixes for this issue – so here’s a list:

Recycle the application pools/ perform IIS resets on the SharePoint sites as required
Check the application pool username/ password has not expired
Ensure the database server has enough free space (1GB minimum)
Truncate transaction logs and shrink databases
Remove the version column from the list of indexed columns
Check for dodgy default values in date fields within your list and update them