It's easy to hit that many files, and they made the change without warning.
If you're on the $10 2TB plan and your files average 100KB, 5 million files means you can only use a quarter of the space you're paying for.
And before you call that unrealistic, my system drive averages 200KB per file and my main personal data drive is close to 300KB per file. Both would hit the limit if I wasn't using something fancy to pack files together.
And then there's the $18 5TB plan with the same limit on file count. Even completely ignoring the option to pay for extra terabytes.
..could you not split it up over multiple, smaller drives then?
I get that this could be frustrating (being surprised specifically), but it seems a pretty reasonable restriction so it seems odd to criticize it like this.
Google Drive is not a device, it’s a cloud storage service. There’s no metaphorized “drive device” either, it’s all under the same virtual root folder.
> could you not split it up over multiple, smaller drives then?
Well, you could create multiple Google Accounts and create all the files in the same Drive with sharing enabled, because the limit isn’t on what is in one user’s Drive, but what one user can create across all Drives.
The problem is that some people actually were well above the 5m files limit, and this sudden update ends up functionally locking them out of their account. They'd have to delete millions of files in some cases if they just want to add more files.
That can be extremely disruptive especially for small businesses, who would be the most likely to depend on a Drive-based workflow.
That's not really a lot. Imagine a script that runs daily and processes demographic data, creating one output file per US zip code. That's over 40k files per run, so you'd hit 5 million files after just a few months.
