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CLAIM: Your Dropbox Can Only Handle A Maximum Number Of Files Before A 'Dropbox Apocalypse' Occurs

Sep 19, 2013, 21:15 IST

Medium / David BurrowsDavid BurrowsDropbox can only handle 300,000 files per user account before it starts to fail, according to David Burrows, Yahoo's former head of ad technology. Burrows currently is the founder of DesignSuperBuild, an adtech consultancy.

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He's also a super-user of Dropbox, paying for its premium functions because he found the product so useful and reliable.

But as a designer and developer, his Dropbox files numbered into the thousands. He writes on Medium:

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As time went on, I ignored the security gossip and really committed, I put everything into that folder, safe in the knowledge it was all going to seamlessly work. But the more I stored in my Dropbox, the more problems I had.

At first there was few mis-syncs, a few stuck files and a bit of "Dropbox: 129%" utilisation in Activity Monitor, but over the last few months it's got really bad. Dropbox hangs with a full core being utilised for hours. New syncs don't finish at all. Time to talk to support…

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At that point he found this web page on Dropbox's web site, which states that Dropbox starts to fail once you dump more than 300,000 files into it:

Dropbox

We emailed Dropbox to see if they wanted to elaborate. We'll update this post if we hear from the company.

A 300K file limit won't affect most users, of course. And the free account with a limit space for uploads is fine for most ordinary users.

But Dropbox has ambitions as an enterprise company, selling its software as a service to big corporations. And for that, it will need to be able to reliably handle more than 300,000 files per account.

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