Google Drive users now have a limit of 5 million items to consider. A Google Workspace spokesman confirmed this change.

What is striking about the change is that Google did not warn its users about the change. A Reddit user discovered the 5 million item limit when, starting February 14, he suddenly started receiving “upload failed” notifications for every action he took in Google Drive. It couldn’t even create a new empty folder.

“In order to maintain strong performance and reliability, individual users are limited to a total of 5 million created items in their Google Drive,” said a Google Workspace spokesperson. According to the spokesman, the change will only affect a small number of users.

Although Google states that users hitting the limit should “just delete a few files,” according to a Google issue tracker, it’s very inconvenient for users themselves. For tens of thousands of users, this is a significant disruption to their daily work.

Limitations of Other Cloud Storage Services

For many users and businesses, storing files online is more convenient than local storage. Especially when everyone started working from home during the pandemic, the global cloud storage market boomed. In 2022, the total market was estimated at 78.6 billion euros.

By default, Google Drive offers 15GB of storage, but users can upgrade their Google One account (an account for Gmail, Drive, and YouTube, among others) to up to 30TB of storage. Google competes with its Google One with Microsoft’s OneDrive, Dropbox and Amazon Cloud Drive.

Google One’s competitors also have limitations on the number of files that can be uploaded. For example, OneDrive has a limit of 50,000 items per folder. It is unknown if Microsoft also has a hard limit on the total number of items. Dropbox claims to have no limit.