Apparently Google Drive has introduced a limit on the number of items, including files and folders, that can be stored: 5 million. The company has never formally announced it, and it seems that the news dates back to at least a few weeks ago; it only surfaced because some users started complaining about it on the official support forums, and Google Support confirmed it.

The official position of the company is that the measure has proved necessary for guarantee the standards of performance and reliability of the service, and that few people will notice; however there are some ways of the implementation that are a little jarring – other than poor communication and no notice, for example, the limit is the same for everyone, no matter how much space you buy.

Google One subscriptions, which mostly revolve around Drive cloud storage, start at 100GB and can go up to 30TB. In this extreme case, you need 6MB files each (on average, of course) to hit the 5 million limit, not counting folders. In the case of 2 TB it drops to only 400 kb. It is clear that those who use Drive mainly to store photos, videos and large files in general should not have major problems, but businesses large and small that use it primarily for documents may run into trouble. This is the case, for example, of a veterinary practice in the United Kingdom, whose testimony can be found, together with those of many others, in the official Issue Tracker (just follow the SOURCE link at the bottom of the article).

Right now there don’t seem to be many separate concrete solutions organize files in compressed archivessuch as ZIP and RAR, which of course count as one file, Or change supplier of cloud storage. In this regard it is worth noting that Dropbox says there is no limit, while OneDrive says you can’t put more than 50,000 files per folder, but there doesn’t seem to be any global limit.