[UPDATE: 3:40PM, 4 February 2023]: Google has announced via its official Drive Twitter account that it is rolling back the 5-million file number limit. The company says that it is exploring other approaches to “preserve stability and optimise performance”. Beyond that, the internet search giant also pledges to communicate more changes to users in advance of their implementation.
[Original Story: 11:30AM, 3 April 2023]:
When it comes to cloud storage, the name Google Drive is among the most ubiquitous, alongside Microsoft’s OneDrive. The former’s free option comes with 15GB of storage space for each account, and you can pay for more if you need it. But it looks beyond a limit to the amount of space you upload to the cloud, there’s a limit on actual number of files too. And some user are finding this out the hard way.
Reddit user u/ra13 first reported this issue last week, getting an Upload Error prompt on their account. The post notes that others have been facing similar issues as early as February, with a tracker for said issue also already being a thing. The tracker would lead people to assume that this was indeed a bug. But as it turns out, Google has implemented a new limit on the number of files that can be uploaded. While this number is a relatively high at 5 million, you can still hit that limit before hitting your storage space cap.
Going back to u/ra13 as the example, they’ve paid to have their storage limit on Google Drive to be pushed up to 2TB. But thanks to the new file number limit, they’ve only hit 1.62TB before being unable to upload more files. The user also notes that prior to encountering this issue, they’ve already had 7 million files in their Google Drive, indicating that the file number limit is a relatively new addition. It is also only recently that the upload error message explicitly mentions the file number limit, rather than just two words.
In a statement to Ars Technica, a Google spokesperson has confirmed that the 5-million file limit is not a bug. Instead, it is “a safeguard to prevent misuse of our system in a way that might impact the stability and safety of the system”. They add that this is actually a limit to “how many items one user can create in any Drive” instead of a cap for all files in a Drive. It’s unclear what the significance of the distinction is, but it sounds like this will be more an issue for Drives with multiple users rather than personal ones.
Granted, this issue as a whole is not something that the average users will be experiencing. In order to hit both the 15GB and the file cap, you’ll need to be uploading five million 3KB files.
(Source: Reddit, Ars Technica, Google / Twitter)
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