The Google Drive cloud isn’t unlimited, a Reddit user has discovered, finding a “creation limit” on one of the world’s most popular file-storage platforms and admitting that you can’t upload everything. that you want in your storage.
Ra13, as he calls himself on Reddit, has pointed out that Google set a limit of 5 million files this February, and users who exceed it receive an error message if they try to directly upload files that exceed that barrier. However, the limit does not apply to shared files, which are already restricted to 400,000 items.
Drive error message to users who exceed their limit
From the company they defend themselves against this limit of 5 million because this is to avoid abuses that could harm the “stability and security” of Drive and that it really is not a limit to the total number of files on a specific unit.
According to Google, the number of affected users is “insignificant”, since theoretically few would reach the important “creation limit” that it has established and that has been discovered by an anonymous Reddit user and echoed by the specialized media Ars Technica .
One of the problems has been that some users have found themselves with the limit from one day to the next. “Please delete 2 million files to continue using your Google Drive account”, a message asked the user who has made the limit known, and those affected who exceeded the limit have suddenly found themselves blocked from uploading new files, and it was up to them to find out what was failing.
Google defends itself by ensuring that the vast majority of users do not reach that limit
Future
Complaints have multiplied because nowhere are users informed that Google Drive has a file limit, so those affected initially thought it was a bug and asked Google to fix it quickly.
However, two months have passed and Google has not issued a public response, although some say that Google has privately confirmed to them what limit is planned, and a pop-up message is beginning to appear in the Drive user interface to some users.
The problem comes with the paid versions of Google Drive, since the company is selling this storage to users, both through Google Workspace business accounts and Google One storage plans for consumers, which has a maximum of 30TB of storage and it costs a mere $150 a month.
Under the motto “As much storage as you need”, these options really do have a limit of 5 million files, a limit that is not registered anywhere. The only thing similar is the 400,000 file sharing limitation, but it’s easy to get around by just stopping file sharing, you don’t have to delete anything.
The limitation doesn’t appear on the Google One or Google Workspace plan pages, and there’s no support document about it, aside from offering no tools to see if you’re getting close to this file limit: there’s no file count on nowhere, an issue that especially outrages those who pay for the service.
The main problem is that there is a possibility that the user reaches the limit of 5 million files before exhausting the storage for which he has paid: Ra13 -the affected person who has made his case known on Reddit- calculates that a user with a 2TB Google One account you can face that dilemma if your average file size is 400KB or less.
In any case, Google insists that this file limit probably won’t be a problem for most people, but it certainly could be for those who upload backups to the cloud or professionals whose applications cause an avalanche. of small files making it clear that this limitation should be warned.
