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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
Go to solution

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

Olivier
Explorer | Level 4
Go to solution

Also decided to leave Dropbox as they don't seem to care about power users anymore. I'd suggest to have a look at NextCloud, it seems it's now quite easy to setup, and so you're done with all this pricing/accounts/lockin headache.

7C
Helpful | Level 6
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there is no support on googled rive and all the big ones, forget it. I tried pcloud for a year, you can even call them, probably the best service so far, plus pretty good pricing. but it was a bit buggy once in a while, probably got better by now, not sure why I didn't like it tbh. you can even transfer your whole whatever cloud in the background to theirs. the integration of Dropbox with android or OSX is still the best though, it's a shame they're ignoring those few tweaks and especially power users. maybe you shouldn't email them, try all social networks, linking / mentioning them in every way you can...good luck with your quest 🙂

dobbiedada
New member | Level 2
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I have about 1.5T in dropbox and I have 1.2M files and I get constant problems - dropbox continually backs up files it's already backed up, constantly hanging on backups.  If I manage to get a dropbox backup to complete, and then create a dozen new files, and then run another dropbox backup, dropbox will spend hours backing up thousands of files including ones it has already backed up. Lots of calls with tech support, including advanced support.  No resolution.

 

And now I find this forum which explains the problem.  Dropbox doesn't actually work when you have a lot of files, specifically > 300,000 - and I have 1.2M.

 

Just so future readers know, I am running a Mac with Mojave, 64G Ram and 12 3.5Ghz CPUs.  So I don't think the problem is my machine.

 

I will be finding a solution other than dropbox, which is clearly not designed for professional use.

7C
Helpful | Level 6
Go to solution

it's been some time since i replied (and luckily found it..) to this thread. 
i tested sync, drive, pcloud and in terms of what you can do and how the app is programmed & designed, not one comes close, except maybe drive. the latter though has weird syncing issues, not because of file amount limitations, but because of the way it works. anyways, now it's time to say goodbye for good. 

i'm close to the limit and apart from weird syncing and being incredibely slow, my macbook is running completely hot everytime i unsync or sync a folder, it even freezes and the whole system starts lagging unbelievabely. this is desastrous. dropbox is a desaster.

why in god`s name haven`t you solved the 300k files limit? it's been almost 10 years???????
this is not professional even though you sell (one of the highest prices in comparison) packages and solutions to professionals? and then completely disregard your customers and their feedback / wishes? such a pity, really. 

getting a new cloud service now and transferring all this mess is taking a week at least, i'm supposed to work with dropbox not because of dropbox. what a disappointment. cancelling my pro plan for the second time and this time for good. pcloud it is. bye. 

Elfreda S.
Helpful | Level 6
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Thanks for all the responses.   I was hoping when Dropbox sees how many frustrated Clients they have out there, it might force them to come up with a solution, but really nothing as of yet.   They only increase the price.  I am still with Dropbox because it is just too much to transfer.   It will take us weeks to implement a new system.   Still a disappointed Dropbox customer.

Sveinbjorn P.
New member | Level 2
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I'm in a jam because I have "too many files", so the commands within the Finder on my mac are very often super sluggish to appear.

 

Since I pay for this service to be able to not think about my data hoarding (😅) it'd be cool if you made dropbox so powerful that this would stop happening, but in the interim it would be nice if the system would catch this and help one deal with it. Because these are my files, and by myself I'm not completely sure how I'd do "less files" without defeating the purpose of having Dropbox. 

 

 

ashgoodman
Helpful | Level 5
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Not only will they not support you, they will refuse to refund you. I am less than 2 months into a  year prepay and they won't refund the prorated 10 months I won't be using despite repeated requests, with their cited reason as "we have a strict policy against refunds". They must really be struggling financially if they need my $200 more than I do.

 

I've moved over to Mega and the experience has been great so far.

JingleDjango
Helpful | Level 6
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Those of you who've migrated services, can you comment on macOS integration and Android apps if possible? Which services have integrated smoothest?  I'm approaching 300k files on my account with only 60% of my allotted data consumed. I'd like to figure out my next move before it becomes a problem.

Thanks.

devanirnf
Helpful | Level 5
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Dropbox is great, but the official client is not.
I've been teaching myself to use only the web interface. It's quite good.
I also have a drive mapping using RaiDrive to access it, when I really need direct access to something on Dropbox.
But I also keep a local copy of my files and sometimes I do rclone -vv --transfers 4 --checkers=4 --dropbox-batch-mode async copy "c:\dropbox" "dropbox".
It doesn't take long and it's much faster than the official client.
It's really sad we can't rely on the official client. At least there are some alternatives using 3rd party apps.

Elfreda S.
Helpful | Level 6
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May I ask what you moved to?   Dropbox will never address this issue.   I learned that most on their support team don't even know about the issue, and definitely, their sales team is completely oblivious.

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