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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.
Jane
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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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.
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
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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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
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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Yes, this helped... it helped me move to another provider. Very likely Google.
Jane
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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Hi there!
If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for a ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X or Facebook.
For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.
If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!