Basic plan

Bulk operations

Act on multiple documents at once instead of changing them one by one.

Bulk operations let you apply the same action to multiple documents in your library in a single request. Instead of deleting, restoring, or moving documents one at a time, select a batch and apply the action to all of them together.

Selecting documents

Every document row in your library and trash carries a checkbox. Tick the checkbox for each document you want to act on. A sticky selection bar appears above the list showing how many documents are selected, with options to Clear the selection or operate on it.

You can also select all visible documents at once using the checkbox in the column header (on desktop). The selection applies only to documents on the current tab—your active library or your trash—and respects any active folder filter. Switching tabs or changing the folder filter clears the selection, and only documents currently rendered on screen are ever submitted.

Available operations

The operations you can perform depend on which tab you are on.

In your active library:

  • Delete — Move documents to trash (Basic and Pro) or permanently delete them (free). Basic accounts' trashed files are kept for 7 days; Pro accounts keep them for 30 days. Free accounts have no trash, and deletion is permanent. Deleting a document that is already in the trash succeeds as a no-op rather than reporting an error.
  • Move to folder — File multiple documents into a single folder, or use "Unfiled" to remove them from any folder. This operation requires the Basic plan; the others do not.

In your trash:

  • Restore — Return trashed documents to your active library. Restoring counts toward your plan's active-file limit and may fail per document if the limit is reached. Each restored document also has its expiry re-capped against your current plan, exactly as a single restore does — see Trash and recovery.
  • Delete forever — Permanently and irreversibly delete documents from trash, along with their readership records.
  • Empty trash — Permanently delete everything in the trash (also available as a button above the trash list). One request purges at most 500 documents; the interface repeats the call until the trash is empty and tells you if anything is left over.

Limits and how they work

You can include up to 100 documents in a single bulk request; a larger list is rejected. If you select more than 100 documents, the interface automatically breaks them into chunks of 100 and sends them in sequence, so the cap is invisible in normal use.

Bulk requests are rate limited to 10 per minute per IP address. All four bulk endpoints — delete, restore, move to folder, and empty trash — draw on the same allowance. Because the interface chunks at 100 documents per request, a single selection larger than about 1,000 documents can exhaust the allowance mid-run: the chunks that already landed took effect, and every document after the cut-off is reported as failed with reason "failed". The lists are re-read from the server afterwards so what you see is accurate; wait a minute and repeat for the remainder.

Per-item results

A bulk operation never fails as a whole because one document in it failed. The response reports each document individually as either done or failed, and every failure carries a reason.

When every document succeeds, the operation completes silently and the list updates. When some fail, a message appears counting the successes and grouping the failures by reason — for example, "Restored 4 of 6 — 2 would exceed your plan's PDF limit — delete a file or upgrade first."

The reasons are:

  • Couldn't be found — The document does not exist, belongs to another user, or is in the wrong state for the operation (for example, moving a trashed document to a folder, or restoring a document that is not in the trash).
  • Would exceed your plan's PDF limit — The operation would push you over your plan's active-file cap. This occurs during restore when your account is full. Delete another file or upgrade your plan to proceed. The cap is evaluated against live account state at the moment each document is written, not against a snapshot taken when the batch started, so a batch cannot slip an account past its limit.
  • Failed — Processing that document did not complete. Try again; if the problem persists, contact support.

Ownership failures deliberately report as "couldn't be found" rather than "permission denied," matching the single-document endpoints. A bulk response therefore cannot be used to discover which document IDs exist outside your own account.

Bulk endpoints accept a document's UUID or its short ID, and echo back whichever identifier you sent. Naming the same document twice — once by each form — processes it once.

Recovery

If an operation partially succeeds, the documents that were processed have been processed — there is no rollback. The interface refreshes your library, trash and folder counts after the operation, so the lists reflect what actually happened; re-select whatever is still there and try again.