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

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

SomeTechGuy
Helpful | Level 6
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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.

76 Replies 76

bandtank
Helpful | Level 7
Go to solution

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.

7C
Helpful | Level 6
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tbh I would not do change to Google drive. I did that and it was a biiiiig. mistake, I lost so many files because drive has similar problems. it still works with that many files, but it will take about 5 to 15 minutes or longer to start and uploading/migrating that many files will very likely lead to errors (drive uploads in the exact order, one file after the other, which very often leads to errors). I kept an instance of Dropbox for the most important files and a big pcloud backup for the rest, which costs about 10 a month for 2tbs and has handy features, like you see the files but they're not there physically. also the app works pretty fast and reliable. Worth to check it out before you go drive and for sure will regret it at some point, never had so many corrupt or missing files in my cloud backup history.

7C
Helpful | Level 6
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by the way... why the hell is this marked as solved??? it isn't solved and hasn't been taken care of, has it.

TowerBR
Helpful | Level 6
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The "solution" pointed out is to switch to Google Drive :relieved: :wink:

BTW, which I did two years ago, and I am very happy indeed.

I keep following this topic to see if dropbox will deign to present a solution ...

 

7C
Helpful | Level 6
Go to solution

aah, i see, ok 😉 well you got lucky then, i really struggled with drive, especially because i had to migrate a lot of files at the same time to 3 systems and it didnt go that well, unfortunately i discovered that weeks later...anyways, still a mystery to me how dropbox doesnt seem to be keen for a proper fix and solution here. 
let's wait and see ... 

Elfreda S.
Helpful | Level 6
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Dropbox has no solution and I don't think they planning on finding one.    We need to make the switch as well and it seems like everyone favors Google drive??

Joe S.45
New member | Level 2
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I've been reading all of this because I'm trying the beta new version of Dropbox Business.  I am my only team member, BUT I have over 800,000 files.  ALL of these files I have on my own hardware that is raided to prevent the possibility of losing any data EVEN if Dropbox goes belly up.  SO my question is this: since I do NOT sync more than 500,000 files on any one of my computers (I have a structural engineering firm and run a variety of computers for various tasks) is that why I haven't had even ONE incident with Dropbox? And these services CAN go belly up real fast without warning.  I have had a few of these services over the years and far and away the worst was LiveDrive (this is the only drive service I have actually lost data with and it REALLY HURT), and OneDrive didn't work out either.  I have Google drive but don't use it much.  Do you think it's actually better?  Thanks for the feedback.

Joe S.45
New member | Level 2
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By the way, I can tell you all that you really must keep copies of your files on a hardware drive in a computer at your site, and it needs to be RAIDED so you have warning when a drive is going belly up so you can do a swap and KEEP ALL THE FILES ALIVE.  These online services are for CONVENIENCE, but we must stop thinking they're SECURE.  You have to have your own fail-safe.  I know that's expensive and not terribly convenient but it 'is what it is'.  There is no other fail-safe approach.  I have about 30TB online, but I also have every spec of it on my own fail-safed hardware.

7C
Helpful | Level 6
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hey joe, so i tried them all, the only one that no issues with file size & number and synced flawlessly was pcloud. they had the cloud only feature that dropbox introduced now ever since, but you cant search for files in your finder, only online. and their support is a bit slow. so when i heard about that dropbox update i thought i'd give it a go. i have cut down my file number from like 2 million files to 200000 by zipping a lot of folders, so the hardware copy contains all the original parts and dropbox only zipped backups where possible or necessary because of file numbers.

what always set dropbox apart from drive is the way it down/uploads..drive would need half an hour to start as it syncs all files everytime it starts...and then it would continue where it took off. for me this didnt work as it **bleep**ed up a lot of folders when i migrated files and their upload/download hierachy is somewhat linear, which means what comes first uploads first, that made things really messy. dropbox can upload various files at once, and i'm working with music - so this is essential: while uploading a big (recording) file i can at the same time update my program file, which inherits all the new important information, but is very low in size. so long story short - that didnt work with drive, it made things VERY VERY messy. pcloud did the job but i can search only online, ia also tried SYNC which worked, but has no search function at all (!!!) - and well so i'm back to dropbox with a new issue, that i'm trying to solve. their new smart sync feature unsmartly syncs folders its not supposed to. and it always happens when i'm workig on mobile data so just yesterday i wondered why my internet is gone and it was because of dropbox silently syncing a 10gb folder in the background, that i havent even selected, or needed or accessed otherwise. so apart from their file size issue (maybe this is exactly related to this??) they seem to have brought up new issues with the new features. i hope this is getting solved soon, as i really dont have the nerve for that and working only with hardware copies is not what i intend to. i can update this here, once they (hopefully) took care of this. 






Joe S.45
New member | Level 2
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Thank you very much for your feedback!  I will keep local 'hardcopies' of everything because I don't actually trust any of these services.  I've been thinking that maybe the reason I haven't had issues is because I don't actually have more than 300,000 files on ONE computer(?), not sure. The one concern I have for this upcoming 'update' is that it is going to online-only sync when it updates apparently.  Then I guess I have to go back in and re-sync all my devices.  That's a little scary and I'm thinking about backing up all of my computers on external HDs to make sure I don't lose ANYTHING.  I have (4) 10TB WDs and I think I'll just cover my butt here.

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