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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.
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Thanks for the feedback. I do love Dropbox interface as well, but their 300K file limit is a bummer. Been with them from the beginning and always had the top plans. They actually can't support small businesses, so don't even know why the try and sell it as a small business solution. We don't even have many files, and 300K files is absolutely nothing.
Thanks so much for the feedback, I will most definitely look into the alternatives. Really sad that Dropbox see all their Clients going and not doing anything about it. I had two tickets closed on me recently, without me even knowing they are closing the ticket. Poor poor supprt.
Dealing with the same issues here. Thnanks for sharing all this. Dropbox replied to me after 2 days then another 4 days and completely disregarded my updates and feedback regarding the issues. In fact, the message I received is below. More boilerplate responses. No explanation regarding whether that's the reason why the service just stopped working recently, despite having no issues over a month ago. Also no explanation for why only a previous version of their software will even begin to syn (but locks up eventually) . Will be moving to another service if even for "better" service and will be advising others the same. I have a month before my subscription expires. I think they are so big they don't think service matters anymore. They are pretty great at "copy and paste" help service so gotta give them credit that they have mastered that useful skill.
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- Walter
Dropbox Community Moderator
Sorry to hear about this vscript - I have passed your comments along to the team and nudged the expert handling your case, informing them on your current status - thank you for the feedback; we appreciate it whether positive or negative.
In addition, I can see that our higher level technician has provided you with an update on your email so I'd suggest that you continued directly with them via your existing ticket.
If there is anything I can help with from my end, do let me know.
the problem is, it's not just vscript, it's all of us.
and probably a **bleep** whole lot more who dont take their time to write some form of feedback into this forum...
what i dont get is how this hasn't been solved yet....it's just that file limit, without that it would be freakin ace.
what is the technical reason for this, if there is one? could someone of dropxbox explain that to us? please?- 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 This all makes sense. But it's hard to believe that something else hasn't changed recently. I didn't have these sync issues two months again and virutally nothing has changed on my end. The new versions of the software don't even lead to a connection/sync. Only 51.4.66 installs correctly which leads me to believe there are further regulatory changes embedded in the architecture. Further, the online platform shows my PC synced and operating on that same 51.4.66 version. Further suggestion that they've made recent changes. Of course, the auto update then renders the sync useless and no one at DB has actually explained the changes despite me asking over and over.
- 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...
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.
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.
Thank you for your patience on this matter.
It appears your Dropbox account contains a large amount of files. The performance of the Dropbox application starts to decline after reaching about 300,000 files. You can read more about this issue in the Help Center:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/39
One way you can speed up your Dropbox is by using selective sync. Selective sync lets you control which files and folders are being synced with your computer. Remember that if you’re having trouble accessing your files right now because of selective sync issues, your files are safe and accessible on dropbox.com.
Learn how to use selective sync in this Help Center article:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/175
Regards,
Matt