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

[7C]

it's crazy that absolutely nobody answered to this, neither dropbox nor other users.
unfortunately i had to quit dropbox because of this file limit, which is extremely annoying.
i dont think its that difficult to get control about and i can't imagine at all, that there are not enough people with this specific request out there. i had 2 million files online and lost almost everything due to this bug.
dropbox didnt do anything about it except repeating their standard statement.
i still ask them every once in a while about the status quo - but it doesnt look like they´re actually working on this. 
now i`m with sync - which is great as in bang for the buck and file limits, but they lack a proper online search and little annoying details like that. and then again google drive has no proper file history and lacks a lot of features. 
 COME ON DROPBOX - do something about it! 

[TowerBR]

I switched to Sync more than a year ago just because of this ridiculous limitation. And I'm convincing everyone I know to change too.

What irritates most is the lack of response from dropbox.

[Jane · Accepted solution]

Hey 7C & TowerBR, thanks for getting in touch on our Community on this discussion. I appreciate the time you’ve devoted in sharing your thoughts on this matter, let me follow-up from where you’ve left off with our support team & we’ll take it from there! 

For starters, you may keep in mind that the 300,000 files limitation, is a soft limit and depends highly on the hardware specifications of the computer running the app, though some users can sync more files without issue. 

Just as an additional point of reference, I’m just attaching these (#1/ #2) resources here that could be of assistance & could further clarify the rationale behind the issue you may have faced. 

I hope that this addresses your inquiry & I’m always here if you’d like to discuss this in a little more detail. Thanks again! 

Mod note: edited to update link in post [last update 2023]

[SomeTechGuy]

Thanks for chiming in a few years too late ;). This isn't true, your suggesting people can go above 300k without issue and that a support team will help.

The support time flat out refused, many times over a period of many months to even investigate the issue unless we got our sync count below 300,000.

When your company refuses to provide support - that turns it into a hard limit.

We use Google Drive 100% internally now. We pay for a team of 10. Both their Backup and Sync and their Google File Stream applications have been amazing to work with. We've since tripled the file count and data size and never had an issue.

The one time we found a bug on Google drive, we had managers and engineers talking with us. They provided updates every week, and credited our time until the issue was resolved.

Dropbox will never be able to compare to that. I've never felt so devalued by a company and support team as I did by dropbox. Leaving was the best thing I ever did for myself and my business. I'm very vocal about this and make sure to speak my mind on the subject with every client considering Dropbox. I've influenced hundreds of purchases to your competitors and will continue doing so for a long time.

[TowerBR]

@SomeTechGuy,  I agree with every single word you said, just replacing Google Drive with Sync and Wasabi, in my case.

I also continue to guide everyone with whom I have contact to leave dropbox.

[Elfreda S.]

I am running into the same issues, with Dropbox just closing my tickets.

I found them unresponsive and so disspointed.  We have been with them for many years, and this is what it has come to.  I would love to know what you all switched to as I am at the point to cancel my subscription of 70 users on the account.  I don't even have that many files, 800K but Dropbox can't handle that.  

[Walter]

Sorry to hear about this @Elfreda S.!

I've passed your comments along to the expert handling your case and gave them a nudge so you should be hearing from them as soon as they have the chance to fully review it.

Moreover, I would like to assure you that such sensitive operations are always a priority and may sometimes prove to be time-consuming. All cases are unique and there is no set timeframe for completion. Having said that, if there's anything else I can do from my end, do let me know. 

Thank you and apologies for any inconvenience this might have caused.

[SomeTechGuy]

No matter what, unless you get below 300k they won't even speak to you.

We left for Google Drive (their File Sync is incredible for our needs, dropbox has nothing even close to that) and have millions of files - no issues. The few times I've had to use their support they escalated when needed and gave same day support.

We also use nextcloud for its advanced filtering capabilities. But, pretty much, Dropbox has the worst of the worst. The only one we ever found to be equally problematic was OneDrive.

[SomeTechGuy]

Just to add, we currently have a team of 10 on google drive with over 1.5 million files.

We haven't had any issues since switching.

And we did internal testing of their service to 10 million files without incident. No unusual ram use. And the file sync is great for interns - it creates a new drive letter that exists only in the cloud and allows them to cache folders they care about. So they don't have to download the entire 750GB of data.