Google has unceremoniously rolled back a Google Drive file limitation it implemented without notice earlier this year.
In short, Google’s popular Google Drive cloud storage service quietly added a restriction to Google Drive sometime in February 2023 limiting how many files a single user could upload to Drive to five million, regardless of how much storage space you actually signed up to have. Naturally, not many individual Google Drive users have over five million files on their drive, so this new restriction didn’t upset too many folks.
However, recently, Google rolled out that restriction to Google Workspace, a suite of Google services, including Drive, aimed at an enterprise crowd, and very quickly, headlines were made. Five million files may sound like a near-infinite number of files, but it’s entirely possible to upload millions of very small files, never hit your storage cap, and find yourself locked out of uploading to Drive with this restriction.
According to Google, this was done “to maintain strong performance and reliability” with the company noting that only a small number of users would be impacted by this restriction. While that’s undoubtedly true, it definitely stings if you pay for hundreds of gigabytes worth of storage, never approach your limit, and then find out you can’t upload anything else to your Drive if you’ve hit that five million limit.
As of now, Google seems to agree, as the company has rolled back this file restriction. According to a tweet from the official Google Drive account, “We recently rolled out a system update to Drive item limits to preserve stability and optimize performance. While this impacted only a small number of people, we are rolling back this change as we explore alternate approaches to ensure a great experience for all.”
If you were impacted by this file upload restriction, it likely made for a headache, but suffice it to say now, regardless of how many files you’ve got, you should be all set when it comes to Google Drive.
