With a 300k File Limit - Does Dropbox Really Provide Business Solutions?

[SomeTechGuy]

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.

[devanirnf]

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.

[ICS-Tax]

Dropbox is a time bomb for business. We exceeded the 300K file limit and it has become unstable. Moving and downloading files takes forever. I appreciate the advice on Google Drive.

[Server_Align]

the 300K LIMIT is old and they have replaced the indexer since from memory, we had over 500K of files when last used, no issues.

We switched out to a more powerful service, OneDrive as it has better windows integration 

[devanirnf]

I did the same. OneDrive is cheaper and the Windows client is very well integrated.

[ICS-Tax]

I liked Dropbox because our people are frequently on the road and don't always have reliable Internet. I also liked how our people can save files using tried and true File Explorer. When they gain Internet access, their files would sync to Dropbox (at least they used to before the 300K file limit). Does OneDrive do that as well?

[devanirnf]

Yes, it does. I think all sync softwares work that way.

[geekforlife]

OneDrive still limits max file size. It used to be 10GB (but now appears to be 250GB?). Also, didn't they drop their equivalent to Selective Sync?

[7C]

hello there

quick update after quite a few tests with other services...
as said i tried google drive (which works fine for shared docs but turned out to be a nightmare with the way it syncs files, i lost hundreds of photographs and music files thanks to gdrive) and also sync and that swiss service i can't remember the name of. 
to be honest  all of them do certain things better and have a few different features, but in terms of reliability they're all in the same ballpark. if you really have files that are actually worth something to you, you might wanna consider 2 cloud services and a physical backup as well, that's the way to go. i also decluttered my box and zipped folders with thousands of small files, which i do not use frequently, which helped a lot. this is not only a problem of dropbox itself, also copy paste processes on macs just like pcs take a lot longer and are prone to errors, if a folder has a few 1000 files (which doesn't necessarily mean, it's a big folder in size). anyways, that helped and also a proper internet connection does make a huge difference. recently switched from 50mpbs to 250 and just let the computer plus dropbox do its work overnight and voila, it did work out several times in the near past.
i think they also must have increased the limit, as i do have dropbox business again with a 3x5tb plan and my main has about 850000 files.  haven't had a single issue in months and i migrated resp copied my entire box 4 times on/over various systems. in fact the only system that fussed a little bit, was my old desktop pc, the macs - and especially the new ones - are working like a charm. 
so for now i'm happy and fine again with db, let's see what the future brings. 

[LoreZyra]

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.

[Server_Align]

re: OneDrive still limits max file size. It used to be 10GB (but now appears to be 250GB?). Also, didn't they drop their equivalent to Selective Sync?

OneDrive 250GB max single file size (I wonder what you are doing if you have files larger)

OneDrive does have Selective Sync >Settings>Account>Choose Folders

OneDrive does have Files on Demand >file explorer>select files>right click context menu>always keep on this device | free up space

Multiple OneDrive accounts can be enabled at once >Settings>Account>Add An Account

OneDrive is a Microsoft product that has good integration with Windows and excellent integration with Office.

When opening a Word document in your OneDrive MS Word see it is in the cloud and opens the Cloud instance of the file as well as the local instance, and updates both at once, this allows for Co-authoring of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.