Seems Google imposes a tough restrict on the variety of recordsdata you may add to Google Drive, its cloud storage service—regardless of an absence of clear documentation that outlines the restrictions. That magic quantity? 5 million.
This hidden depend solely grew to become obvious when customers began operating into it. As reported on Reddit and shared by CNET, customers found this cover the exhausting method in February. In a submit on Google’s IssueTracker, each people and companies famous that uploads had stopped engaged on their accounts, however and not using a clear clarification for the failures, leaving customers confused whereas scrambling to cope with damaged automated integrations and backup methods. Upgrading the account to the next quantity of storage additionally didn’t repair the issue.
In early March, Google’s customer support brokers revealed the exhausting ceiling in particular person replies to account holders, stating they might not exceed 5 million paperwork—even when the entire storage used was underneath the plan’s limits. A Google Workspace spokesperson confirmed this coverage in a press release to CNET, saying particular person customers have been restricted to five million whole created gadgets to “keep robust efficiency and reliability.” Nonetheless, the rollout of this limitation seems to be inconsistent, with others on the IssueTracker thread hitting the restriction on the 1 million mark. Should you’ve encountered Error 403 (“The restrict for the variety of gadgets, whether or not trashed or not, created by this account has been exceeded”), you might have tripped into this subject.
Point out of this restriction on file depend stays lacking from Google’s documentation, too. On the time of this text, solely a assist web page protecting particular person file limitations (with surprisingly superb element) exists. In the meantime, shared drive accounts have their file limits clearly listed as a most of 400,000, and competitor Dropbox has no limitations on the variety of recordsdata uploaded; identical for Field, which the corporate confirmed to CNET.
Affected customers now face a tough choice: Swap accounts (both to a rival service or inside Google), or start deleting recordsdata. Neither activity will likely be easy for these a part of huge organizations (one particular person described this limitation affecting “tens of hundreds” affiliated with their org) and folk who had used their accounts for cloud backups. Backup software program can create a number of small recordsdata as a part of incremental backups, which may add up over time—as was the case for the Redditor who alerted r/Google to this subject.
In response, different Redditors identified a short lived workaround—including all paperwork to some zip recordsdata. (By no means change, Reddit.)
