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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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- Jane
Dropbox Staff
Jane,
This is completely different than what I've been told by support. After 37 days, I've been told basically that nothing is being done to fix my problem because I am trying to sync more than 300,000 files which is unsupported.
if i have eg. 100 files and i use winrar to compress them to 1 rar file do they count as 1 file or 100?
I had the same issue: synced 2.3 million files without realizing how many nested files were in an iPhoto library. Very slow support, finally got to a high enough level that they gave me something that worked. Here are the detailed instructions (for Macs):
If you can not apply Selective sync settings you will need to preform advanced reinstall and ensure that you apply Selective sync settings before syncing your data to your desktop folder.
To ensure that the software is working correctly, I’d like you to do a complete reinstall to try to fix the problem. This will not affect or remove the files in your Dropbox folder.
Please save and quit all programs accessing files in the Dropbox folder, and then follow these instructions:
Note: Please be sure to take note or take a screenshot of any Selective Sync settings you may have applied as well as the location of your Dropbox folder (if not in the default location) prior to re-installing, as you will need to match these settings upon re-install.- Stop Dropbox (If needed):
- Click the Dropbox icon in the menu bar at the top of your screen
- Click on the gear icon in the Notifications panel and select 'Quit Dropbox'
- Download the newest version:
https://www.dropbox.com/downloading
Open your Terminal app (Located at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
Copy and paste the following lines into the Terminal, ONE AT A TIME, and press ENTER after each one. PLEASE make sure you copy and paste these commands (don't type them by hand), as getting them wrong could cause some harm. You'll be prompted for your computer's admin password (not your Dropbox password) after entering the first command. Keep in mind that the password field in the terminal will remain blank as you type your password. After you type it, just press ENTER. You'll know that these instructions complete normally once the initial line of text (called prompt) comes up again:
sudo chown "$USER" "$HOME"
sudo chown -R "$USER" ~/Dropbox
sudo chmod -R u+rw ~/Dropbox
sudo mv ~/.dropbox ~/.Trash/dropbox.old
sudo chmod -N ~
sudo mv /Library/DropboxHelperTools ~/DropboxHelperTools.old
Please note that once the prompt displays, the instruction completed the requested task and is ready for the next command. If the command returns an error or does not respond after an hour, you may want to try restarting your computer and try these steps again.Delete the Dropbox application from the Applications folder. You may need to provide your computer password in order to perform this action.
Open the .dmg file from step # 2 and double click the Dropbox icon to install Dropbox.
When Dropbox has finished installing, during the initial setup and sign in process, apply any Selective Sync settings you may have had prior to the reinstall and select the Dropbox folder location (if not in the default location).
IMPORTANT NOTE: Because this process removes the previous settings and configuration, if you wish to avoid re-downloading your Dropbox content, you will need to manually choose the location for Dropbox to sync to, otherwise you will create a new Dropbox folder which will start to download your content again.
To select your already established folder on your drive, after signing in and choosing which folders to sync, and before you click on "Open my Dropbox folder", you should see an "Advanced Settings" link, click on this.
Then you can choose the parent folder of the already established Dropbox folder. For example, if you have your Dropbox folder in the path "/Volumes/DifferentPlace/Dropbox (Team)" you'll want to select the folder "/Volumes/DifferentPlace/".
At the end of this process, after clicking "Open my Dropbox folder", it might take some time to re-index the files and sync any pending changes.
Please note that any changes made to the files in the Dropbox folder, the web interface or other linked devices while the folder was "off-line", will generate conflicted copies:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/36
Finally, this process only works when linking to the exact same account that was previously linked to this computer. If you'd like to merge accounts, please refer to the following Help Center article:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/9104- Jane
Hi Jane,
Thanks; I did.
However, considering that all of your competitors, except Box (so far), have moved away from limited # files sync'd, I see no alternative to switching to OneDrive or Google as much as I do not want to. It's nice to hear you say your team is finally looking beyond this limit, but the messages I get loud and clear from support is that Dropbox simply will not support, under any circumstance, sync'ing more than 300k files. Considering that many trillions of photos alone are taken each year, this limit seems pretty stone age.
- Jane
Yes, this helped... it helped me move to another provider. Very likely Google.
- Jane
I would like to start with Im no great fan of dropbox they were great around 2010 but hitting 2020 its just OMG the same issues still present, like WTH!
That being said, I manage a 3TB pro account (we used to have DB Teams but I only ever needed one account just the >1TB space it gave us)
This is currently at 2.2TB in 625,000+ files & 130,000+ folders (like OneDrive folders count in the file count for DB see insert)
Now syncing a new machine or resyncing an existing one IS A NIGHTMARE of time!
Wo be any DB employee who ever tells me to resync to fix an issue. Im talking a week+.
But unlike everyone else Im not overly experencing "delays" with more than 300,000 files.
One thing that might be relevant (unsure) is I switched OFF SMART SYNC at the account level on the web site. Using only SELECTIVE SYNC some machines have heavy syncing with around 700K in files/folders and some lite with 75K files/folders.
On the heavy file/folder machines the filecache.dbx is at 2GB and my sigstore.dbx is 10GB. This 10GB might be important as my understanding is DB slows down as the SQL Lite used for databasing doesnt handle 10GB+ files very well so mabye im hovering just on it with 700K?!?!?! Which leads me to think about depth of tree with larger deep trees needing more DBX file and taking you over the 10GB mark? See file names are not stored in folders inside the DBX file each file PATH and NAME are stored for each file some more down in the deeppth you have files the lower that number gets?!?!? (all conjecture of course)
For me the DB app never spikes above 2 to 3GB memory doing this only during soem resync activity and mostly hovers under 200meg
Compared to OneDrive thats hovers around 1GB sycning the same stuff. My Onc drive root location is in the dropbox folder like this \DROPBOX\@OD so anything in OneDrive syncs to DB and anything in the DB od folder syncs to OneDrive (half to a OneDrive for business user folder and the other half to a sharepoint site (yes i do know they are both SPO sites))
So to those having issues I would suggest at least trying the client without SMART SYNC which really you only need if your short of space, and I would rather have it faster & working than saving a $100 on a smaller drive. Go 5TB drives! :-P
( i have edited this a few times so might have some junk typos etc or nonsense setences soory :-/ )
