What you need to know
- Google has quietly rolled out a new 5 million files limit for Drive accounts at scale.
- This change came out of nowhere and many users had their accounts locked until they deleted hundreds, thousands, or millions of files.
- Google officially says this was done “to prevent misuse of the system.”
Google has introduced a headache-inducing new file limit for heavy users of its cloud storage service Drive.
A Redditor got a new message from Google when he went into Drive (via Ars Technica). The failure message states, “This account has exceeded the 5 million item creation limit. To create more items, move the item to the Trash and permanently delete the item.” increase. Thus, it turns out that Google quietly introduced his 5 million item limit to users’ drive storage without notice.
A Redditor explained that he has a 2 TB Google Drive account and is currently taking up 1.67 TB of his limit. It was then explained that even though the files are small (less than 400 KB as an example), I hit my new 5 million file limit well before my account’s data storage limit.
Users who purchased 2 TB, 5 TB, 20 TB, or 30 TB for Drive accounts (both business and consumer) will receive this message regardless, so don’t get hung up on this warning. There is also a limit of 400,000 shared files, but that can be fixed by unsharing those files — no need to erase everything.
Both Ars Technica and Reddit users did a little digging and found that this has been an issue since February. Users started reporting this on the IssueTracker as confusion started to arise. Many assumed this was some serious bug. Some users reported quiet confirmation from Google Support about this new file limit, so unfortunately that’s not the case.
In addition, Ars Technica has received confirmation from Google that the new file limits are “a safeguard to prevent misuse of the system in ways that may affect its stability and security.” The company clarifies that the limit has to do with “the number of items that a single user can create in any given drive,” saying that “very few users are affected here.”
Specifically, text files can be very small, and you may store large numbers of text files for work or educational purposes. Google One sells different storage size plans, including 2 TB plans for $10/month or $100/year, with the largest package offering 30 TB for $150/month. Given that users can run out of “space” long before they actually hit the data cap they paid for, Google is now changing the way packages are presented to users, or at least more about file limits. You may have to think straight.
