Google is reversing its decision to put a file creation limit on Google Drive. About two months ago, the company decided to limit every Google Drive user to his 5 million files. The company did this in the worst possible way and, to their complete surprise, rolled out the limit without prior notice. I’ve noticed that I can’t upload new files until I’ve deleted enough files to go below . Some of these users were companies whose systems were brought down by sudden file caps. Many initially thought the limit was a bug, as Google never gave any notice that the change was coming.
Apparently, sunlight really is the best disinfectant. The story was picked up in Tech News on Friday, with Ars telling Google that the file cap is not a bug, but actually “a bug in the system in a way that could affect its stability and security. It’s a safety net to prevent misuse.” system. ” Google Announces After Weekend Reaction To “Google Drive’s Secret File Cap!” Monday night when I was rolling back the limit:
We recently rolled out a system update to drive item limits to maintain stability and optimize performance. This only affected a small number of people, but we are rolling this change back as we explore alternative approaches to provide a great experience for everyone.
— Google Drive (@googledrive) April 4, 2023
Google has said it originally rolled out the restrictions to discourage what it calls “misuse” of Drive, and hopes Google will “explore alternative approaches to providing a great experience for everyone.” It looks like we might see more types of drives, as they tweeted that they were in. Drive future limits. Over the past year, Google has been on a mission to reduce costs. The company seems to want to do something to weed out the most resource-intensive Drive users.
The problem with further limiting Drive is that Google charges users for Drive storage, and limits sold by Google are measured in gigabytes and terabytes. Google Workspace Business accounts get up to 5 TB of storage for regular accounts. Call Google and negotiate with a sales representative for unlimited options. A consumer-level option for more Google storage, Google One offers up to a staggering 30 TB for $150/month. And Drive is more than just a Dropbox clone. Google encourages developers to build the “Drive API” into their apps, allowing developers to easily add cloud storage to their products.
All of these people were hit with the 5 million file cap, which was ridiculously small for most of Google’s storage tiers. At around 20GB he could reach 5 million files if all you have are 4KB files. For a while, Google was selling storage to people who probably couldn’t use it because of this new limit, but it wasn’t documented anywhere.
of reply In a tweet announcing the rollback, Google added the century’s modest line: “If we need to make any changes, we will notify users in advance.”
The complete lack of communication was pretty shocking. His February thread originally on the Drive Issue Tracker is a sysadmin’s nightmare, with users sharing stories such as: Real users and their day-to-day work. Another user said, “This issue is now affecting all sites across the UK and we were unable to use the full his PMS integration due to this issue.”
These issues could have been avoided if Google had simply communicated its plans.
Drive’s Google Workspace team knows how to run enterprise software. This group has an entire blog post and support article system, and changes are often announced months in advance. Workspace business users have the option of a slower, more conservative release schedule. We also have a public calendar of feature releases for Google Workspace. For some inexplicable reason, all commonly used communication and rollout channels went out the window. The change was introduced directly into production without warning, but administrators scrambled to find out what was wrong.
It’s good that Google is reversing this bizarre decision, but how did it happen in the first place? Why didn’t they follow their standard operating procedures? Workspace is built to support your business It’s a time-tested product, and companies want stability. Deliberately disrupting the workings of a business without warning is unacceptable. Presumably everyone on the Workspace team knows this, but somehow this organizational knowledge didn’t influence Google’s public behavior.
