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.

[meredithutah]

Not sure that's true. 

Today we completely reinstalled the OS on one system, and it still will not sync.

When working with Support, they said "you have to get below 300,000 or they can't do anything.

We're only at 450,000 - and the computer is an i9-12900KS, with DDR5 RAM, PCIE NVMe's, and a symmetrical 1Gbps Fiber Connection - so it's definitely not "System Dependent."

They said "it could be Anti-Virus then," but it's not, since it's a fresh install, and the AV wasn't installed yet.

Their only other suggestion was to pick "selective-sync," which is a cop-out. If we didn't need to sync all of the folders - we wouldn't be syncing them to begin with.

So, until we get below 300,000 - they say "oh well." 

Our OneDrive, and SharePoint (OneDrive for Business) sync perfectly, so we'll have to leave Dropbox. 

I'd love to switch to Google, but we don't trust their data mining with the files we sync.

This sucks, since we've been with Dropbox since '08.

[ashgoodman]

I have switched to Mega and couldn't be happier. I get 8 TB of storage and so far no issues with missing files or failed syncs. Been using them for a year.

[Server_Align]

re : 'Our OneDrive, and SharePoint (OneDrive for Business) sync perfectly, so we'll have to leave Dropbox.'

Are you syncing the same file set? I attempted this and the Actions of each of the sync agents conflicted with the other.

Dropbox uses alternative streams to store data with the file, OneDrive updates files you send up with a modified version with SPO info, Dropbox then updates this with new alternative stream data, causing OneDrive to update the file again, and they sit there and whack away at each other.

TBH just use OD4B

[harrysfil]

Responses from Dropbox support on question "Is there a plan in the future to overcome this obstacle?":
"This is not considered an obstacle by Dropbox. It is a limitation for syncing files."
"We offer Selective sync and online only features to allow the sync to work smoothly for Business users who use large amounts of files."
no extra comments from me...

[leandrosilva]

I'm currently experience that issue with the sync being stuck, because we have 1 million files...most of the files / folders are online-only, but Dropbox solution was the selective sync option.

Most of Dropbox Business users have more than 300k files. Why don't increase or remove that limit (limitation that apparently already has several years now)?

Unfortunately, I only found out about it last week and it's very frustrating to pay a Business subscription, and then have to upload files and folders through the Dropbox website (instead of the desktop app) because the folders are not immediately available on the computer...

[SomeTechGuy · Accepted solution]

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.

[AlignAdmin]

Using SlopBox for anything but the most basic cloud storage today is just plain stupid.

Switch to OneDrive for business via Office365, one $10 account gets you 1TB of SharePoint cloud, and 1TB of Specific Account cloud.

Slopbox cant even manage file permissions its a joke.