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SomeTechGuy's avatar
SomeTechGuy
Helpful | Level 6
8 years ago

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 article hotlinked everywhere says anything above 300,000 files will have degraded performance. However, the problem is much deeper than this. The dropbox desktop application often crashes, stops syncing new clients - and sometimes stops syncing old clients.

I've opened multiple support tickets on this issue, on the crashing issue, on the sync issue - and I keep getting told by the support teams the same answer. They will not support me with more than 300,000 files - and they close the tickets.

So, I ask in seriousness, most businesses have far more than 300,000 files they want to keep available through cloud solutions. OneDrive, Google Drive and many others have no file support count limit - in fact Google Drive has some pretty sweet optimizations for working specifically with millions of little files.

Anyway I've spent the last month trying to get Dropbox support to address the crashing issue (we are at about 40% of the 1TB limit, with around 3 million files) and I keep hitting a brick wall with them. Fortunately, it comes at a time where we haven't yet purchased Dropbox for Business. Today, I cancel my many many many years old Dropbox subscription for favour of a new vendor - but I have to ask... what exactly does Dropbox provide for Small Business? Do they actually support more than 300k files for business clients? Because they sure don't for pro users. And I'd like to be able to make informed suggestions for my clients (we do a lot of consultant work).

I've had a lot of other issues over the years, including their support system based around Zendesk no longer sending emails and support teams blind closing tickets. I asked many times to have them address this issue as well - and they do not. Not to mention support tickets getting generated 4 or more times on submission to Zendesk. We've even had large groups of files vanishing with a Server Error 500 when trying to restore, causing us at one point to lose over 100,000 files. The cause was never determined and took almost 20 support requests with them repeatedly advising me they were restoring the files (after lots of apologies later, the files were still never restored). So seriously asking, is the business package really a business grade solution?

Minor update :
After 3 years of reporting issues and logs, I caught one of the many repeat crash errors in a debugger today.

The dropbox team needs to learn how to wrap their file operations in a try catch and how to fix their own server 500 errors.

After being refused support again, we left dropbox and I've never looked back

 

PLEASE NOTE BELOW:  I have NEVER accepted this as the solution, nor do I agree with their posted response.  It is factually incorrect, and dishonest, and they marked their own response as the resolution - which it is not.  The right answer is to switch a professional platform.  We currently have over 10 million files stored on Google Drive, and we have not had an issue in the 6 years since we transitioned.  Dropbox crashed and would not run (as shown above and proven in logs) after 300K with their support refusing to assist once you exceed the "soft" limit.  It is not a business solution, it is incapable of it.

  • 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.

  • 7C's avatar
    7C
    Helpful | Level 6

    it's crazy that absolutely nobody answered to this, neither dropbox nor other users.
    unfortunately i had to quit dropbox because of this file limit, which is extremely annoying.
    i dont think its that difficult to get control about and i can't imagine at all, that there are not enough people with this specific request out there. i had 2 million files online and lost almost everything due to this bug.
    dropbox didnt do anything about it except repeating their standard statement.
    i still ask them every once in a while about the status quo - but it doesnt look like they´re actually working on this. 
    now i`m with sync - which is great as in bang for the buck and file limits, but they lack a proper online search and little annoying details like that. and then again google drive has no proper file history and lacks a lot of features. 
     COME ON DROPBOX - do something about it! 

    • TowerBR's avatar
      TowerBR
      Helpful | Level 6

      I switched to Sync more than a year ago just because of this ridiculous limitation. And I'm convincing everyone I know to change too.

       

      What irritates most is the lack of response from dropbox.

      • Jane's avatar
        Jane
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
        Hey 7C & TowerBR, thanks for getting in touch on our Community on this discussion. I appreciate the time you’ve devoted in sharing your thoughts on this matter, let me follow-up from where you’ve left off with our support team & we’ll take it from there! 
         
        For starters, you may keep in mind that the 300,000 files limitation, is a soft limit and depends highly on the hardware specifications of the computer running the app, though some users can sync more files without issue. 
         
        Just as an additional point of reference, I’m just attaching these (#1/ #2) resources here that could be of assistance & could further clarify the rationale behind the issue you may have faced. 
         
        I hope that this addresses your inquiry & I’m always here if you’d like to discuss this in a little more detail. Thanks again! 
         
        Mod note: edited to update link in post [last update 2023]
  • Sveinbjorn P.'s avatar
    Sveinbjorn P.
    New member | Level 2

    I'm in a jam because I have "too many files", so the commands within the Finder on my mac are very often super sluggish to appear.

     

    Since I pay for this service to be able to not think about my data hoarding (😅) it'd be cool if you made dropbox so powerful that this would stop happening, but in the interim it would be nice if the system would catch this and help one deal with it. Because these are my files, and by myself I'm not completely sure how I'd do "less files" without defeating the purpose of having Dropbox. 

     

     

    • ashgoodman's avatar
      ashgoodman
      Helpful | Level 5

      Not only will they not support you, they will refuse to refund you. I am less than 2 months into a  year prepay and they won't refund the prorated 10 months I won't be using despite repeated requests, with their cited reason as "we have a strict policy against refunds". They must really be struggling financially if they need my $200 more than I do.

       

      I've moved over to Mega and the experience has been great so far.

      • JingleDjango's avatar
        JingleDjango
        Helpful | Level 6

        Those of you who've migrated services, can you comment on macOS integration and Android apps if possible? Which services have integrated smoothest?  I'm approaching 300k files on my account with only 60% of my allotted data consumed. I'd like to figure out my next move before it becomes a problem.

        Thanks.

  • LoreZyra's avatar
    LoreZyra
    Helpful | Level 6

    I'm a Dropbox Business user (located in Japan). I have both the personal and business accounts on DropBox. On my business account, I have over 2.6TB of files (numbering over 920,000 files). My business account is set to 10TB storage. The personal account has very little in it (about 8.6GB). I use DropBox on my MacOS and all my Apple devices. DropBox has, so far, provided the best experience for integration with Mac and iOS. On my iPad, I can easily retrieve my files sync'ed from my Mac. Similar to SomeTechGuy, I also don't trust cloud based storage to save my ass. I have a raided-NAS and separate 8TB time vault drive. (The 8TB drive can travel with me but the NAS stays in the office.) Until recently, I've had no major issues with DropBox. However, lately, they are giving me strange error about my filenames... (https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-files-folders/non-ascii-Filenames/td-p/584676) 

     

    I've tried OneDrive and found it a waste of my time. Virtually no support for MacOS users. I'm not a fan of Google services, so I've never tried them. If forced, I would simply move my business to AWS. More expensive, but awesome support and services.

  • Christophe4's avatar
    Christophe4
    New member | Level 2

    Same issue here and DROPBOX assistance useless... We are going to switch now to sync or Google Drive. Already many complains over the last two years and no improvements AT ALL!

    Their comment about the 300k is just a lie. It does not experience of loss of performances, because IT DOES NOT WORK!!!!

    We have two new desktop and every 6months, dropbox crashes continuously... ON BOTH computers. It takes a week going folder per folder to resync everything. A waste of time. 

    Bye bye DROPBOX...

    • Elfreda S.'s avatar
      Elfreda S.
      Helpful | Level 6

      Please let me know how your alternatives are working out.   We need to make the switch but have not found a solution that I am completely comfortable with.   

       

  • Elfreda S.'s avatar
    Elfreda S.
    Helpful | Level 6

    May I ask what you moved to?   Dropbox will never address this issue.   I learned that most on their support team don't even know about the issue, and definitely, their sales team is completely oblivious.

    • devanirnf's avatar
      devanirnf
      Helpful | Level 5

      I didn't . As I said, I use RaiDrive (to map Dropbox to a drive).

      And I keep a local copy of my files. Just in case. And I run a Rclone batch file that syncs them with Dropbox.

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