Google Drive has a file-sharing limit of 400,000 files, but that’s easy to work around by just unsharing files—you don’t have to delete anything. This limit is also thoroughly documented in Google’s support articles. The 5 million total file cap isn’t documented anywhere, and remember, it has been two months since this rolled out. It’s not listed on the Google One or Google Workspace plan pages, and we haven’t seen any support documents about it. Google also doesn’t have any tools to see if you’re getting close to this file limit—there’s no count of files anywhere. We’ve emailed Google a ton of questions and will update this if we hear back.
Five million 4KB files would take up 20GB of storage, so that file limit is nowhere near enough for Google customers to use the storage they are actually buying. You could very easily store billions of files in 30TB of space. Even if Google is going to somehow argue this limit is acceptable, it’s inexcusable to make this a surprise for paying customers. Google knows the right way to do this: you email everyone, you make a blog post, and you post a pop-up warning message in the Drive UI, and you do this all months ahead of actually rolling out the change. Especially for Workspace business customers, which are supposed to be paying for a more stable version of Google’s services with a slow rollout, a surprise change is just baffling.
(Update, 5:57 pm: A Google spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the file limit isn’t a bug, calling the 5 million file cap “a safeguard to prevent misuse of our system in a way that might impact the stability and safety of the system.” The company clarified that the limit applies to “how many items one user can create in any Drive,” not a total cap for all files in a drive. For individual users, that’s not a distinction that matters, but it could matter if you share storage with several accounts.
Google added, “This limit does not impact the vast majority of our users’ ability to use their Google storage.” and “In practice, the number of impacted users here is vanishingly small.”)