Turns out Google imposes a tough restrict on the variety of recordsdata you’ll be able to add to Google Drive, its cloud storage service—regardless of an absence of clear documentation that outlines the restrictions. That magic quantity? Five million.

Update, 4/5/23: Google is eradicating the file depend restrict for Drive accounts. In a tweet on the Google Drive Twitter account, the corporate says that it has reversed its policy whereas searching for different methods to enhance efficiency for the service. The Google Drive crew has additionally promised to inform users in advance about adjustments to accounts. Our unique story follows under.

This hidden depend solely turned obvious when customers began working into it. As reported on Reddit and shared by CNET, customers found this cover the onerous manner in February. In a publish 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 take care of damaged automated integrations and backup techniques. Upgrading the account to a better quantity of storage additionally didn’t repair the issue.

In early March, Google’s customer support brokers revealed the onerous ceiling in particular person replies to account holders, stating they might not exceed 5 million paperwork—even when the full storage used was below the plan’s limits. A Google Workspace spokesperson confirmed this coverage in an announcement to CNET, saying particular person customers had been restricted to five million complete created objects to “maintain strong performance and reliability.” However, the rollout of this limitation seems to be inconsistent, with others on the IssueTracker thread hitting the restriction on the 1 million mark. If you’ve encountered Error 403 (“The limit for the number of items, whether trashed or not, created by this account has been exceeded”), you could have tripped into this situation.

Mention of this restriction on file depend stays lacking from Google’s documentation, too. At the time of this text, solely a assist web page masking individual file limitations (with surprisingly high quality element) exists. Meanwhile, shared drive accounts have their file limits clearly listed as a maximum of 400,000, and competitor Dropbox has no limitations on the number of files uploaded; similar for Box, which the corporate confirmed to CNET.

Affected customers now face a tough choice: Switch accounts (both to a rival service or inside Google), or start deleting recordsdata. Neither activity will probably be easy for these a part of extensive organizations (one individual described this limitation affecting “tens of thousands” 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 situation.

In response, different Redditors identified a brief workaround—including all paperwork to some zip recordsdata. (Never change, Reddit.)