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This page provides information about folders in buckets with hierarchical namespace enabled.
OverviewFolders exist as a resource in buckets with hierarchical namespace enabled. You can organize objects within folders in a file system-like structure. Cloud Storage provides folder management APIs that enable operations such as creating, deleting, renaming, and listing folders, as well as retrieving folder metadata.
A folder's metadata contains structured information about the folder. For detailed information about folder metadata, see the Folder
resource in the Cloud Storage JSON API reference documentation.
The key components of a folder metadata are as follows:
bucket
: The name of the bucket where the folder resides. For example, my-bucket
.id
: A unique identifier for the folder within the bucket. For example, hns-bucket/dir1/
.kind
: The resource type. For a folder, this value is always storage#folder
.name
: The name of the folder. For example, dir1/
.selfLink
: A URL that references the folder in the Cloud Storage API.timeCreated
: The timestamp when the folder was created. For example, 2023-05-05T16:32:08.878000+00:00
.updated
: The timestamp when the folder was last updated. For example, 2024-05-06T16:32:08.878000+00:00
.When creating folders, consider the following:
Object and folder names: Buckets with hierarchical namespace enabled, support all valid object names, including those with leading, trailing slashes (/
) or consecutive slashes. Each forward slash (/
) in an object name represents a folder. The following table shows examples of the relationship between object names and their corresponding location in the folder hierarchy:
foo.txt
Every bucket includes a root folder. Object foo.txt
resides under the root folder of the bucket. dir1/foo.txt
Object foo.txt
resides within a top-level folder named dir1/
. The top-level folder is distinct from the root folder. dir1/
The trailing slash in object names like dir1/
indicates that the object resides within the folder. In this example, the object name dir1/
is the same as the parent folder name dir1/
. dir1//foo.txt
Object foo.txt
resides in a second-level folder named dir1//
, a child folder of dir1/
.Maximum folder depth: Buckets with hierarchical namespace enabled support a maximum folder depth of 50. As a result, object names cannot have more than 50 slashes (/
).
Maximum folder name size: 512 bytes (UTF-8 encoded).
Automatic folder creation: Creating a new object automatically creates any non-existent folders specified in the object's path. For example, creating an object named dir1/foo.txt
automatically creates the folder dir1/
if it doesn't already exist.
Sensitive or personally identifiable information (PII): Folder names are more broadly visible than folder metadata. For example, folder names appear in URLs and when listing folders or objects in a bucket. Don't include sensitive information or PII in folder names.
If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how Cloud Storage performs in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.
Try Cloud Storage freeExcept as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Last updated 2025-10-02 UTC.
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