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Forum Discussion
With a 300k File Limit - Does Dropbox Really Provide Business Solutions?
For many many years, I've been a Dropbox Pro member. During this time, they decided at some point, that 300,000 files is the maximum they will support. Now, I know what you are thinking. The ar...
I did not accept this as a solution (now fixed). It doesn't solve anything and is factually incorrect. At the time of your reply and this post, there is a baked in hard-limit in Dropbox that makes it unusable - and your support team refused to provide support to anyone with over 300K files. Nothing in your response you marked as the "answer" addresses this in any way shape or form. Wishing you had the answer isn't the same as providing one.
The right answer was moving to Google Drive and getting an actual business grade cloud based file sync solution in place.
Afaik it is a 2 part problem.
My theory
On the PC side, they created a 32bit application which means a hard memory limit of 4GB. And they built it in such a way it had to retain every file in memory, instead of just a reference to the file. So after 300k files they will hit some kind of internal memory limit. And somehow they loop it through system processes, which can cause a BSOD.
The bigger problem is their backend is a hot mess. I get server and 404 errors all the time - even just doing basic operations like restoring files.
I think they made some poor architectural decisions that can't be solved without impacting their full user base. And that's why services like Google Drive - which no longer follow those old architecture patterns, aren't having these issues.
It's important to remember their bread and butter is users paying monthly with only 50 files - anyone seriously using it they don't want and can't afford to keep on their fractured platform. Imho of course
My theory
On the PC side, they created a 32bit application which means a hard memory limit of 4GB. And they built it in such a way it had to retain every file in memory, instead of just a reference to the file. So after 300k files they will hit some kind of internal memory limit. And somehow they loop it through system processes, which can cause a BSOD.
The bigger problem is their backend is a hot mess. I get server and 404 errors all the time - even just doing basic operations like restoring files.
I think they made some poor architectural decisions that can't be solved without impacting their full user base. And that's why services like Google Drive - which no longer follow those old architecture patterns, aren't having these issues.
It's important to remember their bread and butter is users paying monthly with only 50 files - anyone seriously using it they don't want and can't afford to keep on their fractured platform. Imho of course
my problem now is, I need to find a service that works. I had all my files transferred to sync. I've quit now as they weren't able to implement a proper search feature for years and also their download feature is a joke. then I uploaded everything to Google drive. well not everything because it's so unbelievably slow (I tried all the tricks) and after finishing a few folders (that folder has probably a 100000 files on its own, but is only a few gigs big) I wanted to remove them, as in selectable sync. drive is removing them since over a week now....til it starts (and finishes processing) it takes almost an hour, and it crashes regularly. the drive support is a joke, unfortunately. I googled pcloud for a while and it sounded too good to be true, I've heard of stuck transfers, folder structures gone missing, etc. it's crazy but it seems like all those cloud services really just work out perfectly as long as you have a few gigs only, maybe just enough to be a paying customer. so I'm still on a quest for a service for my 2tbs....the search continues...
- by the way... why the hell is this marked as solved??? it isn't solved and hasn't been taken care of, has it.
The soft limit caused a huge headache for me. After syncing a few Apple Photo libraries, my file count went to 2M. Dropbox became unusable for a month. It took weeks for me to find a workaround on a second computer by slowly syncing and deleting files.
Support responses were slow and mostly unhelpful. After losing a month of access to my Dropbox client, I asked for a refund for the lost month. They told me they don't do that but could give me an extra 2GB <eyeroll/>.
This happened May-June, 2018.
The "solution" pointed out is to switch to Google Drive :relieved: :wink:
BTW, which I did two years ago, and I am very happy indeed.
I keep following this topic to see if dropbox will deign to present a solution ...
Has anyone made progress on this? I am about to change to Google Drive if it is still the recommended solution for larger file counts. I currently have around 1.3 million files and I managed to workaround this by running multiple Dropbox instances in docker containers on a server, but that is extremely stupid and way more work than should be necessary. Yeah, it worked, but I don't want to deal with it anymore. If Google Drive can sync my files without causing an IT nightmare, that would be ideal. I'm hesitant to switch, but I'm not sure why I guess. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
- tbh I would not do change to Google drive. I did that and it was a biiiiig. mistake, I lost so many files because drive has similar problems. it still works with that many files, but it will take about 5 to 15 minutes or longer to start and uploading/migrating that many files will very likely lead to errors (drive uploads in the exact order, one file after the other, which very often leads to errors). I kept an instance of Dropbox for the most important files and a big pcloud backup for the rest, which costs about 10 a month for 2tbs and has handy features, like you see the files but they're not there physically. also the app works pretty fast and reliable. Worth to check it out before you go drive and for sure will regret it at some point, never had so many corrupt or missing files in my cloud backup history.
aah, i see, ok ;) well you got lucky then, i really struggled with drive, especially because i had to migrate a lot of files at the same time to 3 systems and it didnt go that well, unfortunately i discovered that weeks later...anyways, still a mystery to me how dropbox doesnt seem to be keen for a proper fix and solution here.
let's wait and see ...Dropbox has no solution and I don't think they planning on finding one. We need to make the switch as well and it seems like everyone favors Google drive??
