After disrupting businesses, Google Drive’s secret file cap is dead for now

Google is backtracking on its decision to put a file creation cap on Google Drive. Around two months ago, the company decided to cap all Google Drive users to 5 million files, even if they were paying for extra storage. The company did this in the worst way possible, rolling out the limit as a complete surprise and with no prior communication. Some users logged in to find they were suddenly millions of files over the new limit and unable to upload new files until they deleted enough to get under the limit. Some of these users were businesses that had the sudden file cap bring down their systems, and because Google never communicated that the change was coming, many people initially thought the limitation was a bug.

Apparently, sunshine really is the best disinfectant. The story made the tech news rounds on Friday, and Ars got Google on the record saying that the file cap was not a bug and was actually "a safeguard to prevent misuse of our system in a way that might impact the stability and safety of the system." After the weekend reaction to "Google Drive's Secret File Cap!" Google announced on Twitter Monday night that it was rolling back the limit:

Google told us it initially rolled the limitation out to stop what it called "misuse" of Drive, and with the tweet saying Google wants to "explore alternate approaches to ensure a great experience for all," it sounds like we might see more kinds of Drive limitations in the future. Google has been on a cost-cutting mission over the past year, and it sounds like the company wants to do something to cut off the most resource-intensive Drive users.

The problem with further limiting Drive is that Google charges people for Drive storage, and the limit it sells is measured in gigabytes and terabytes. Google Workspace Business accounts go up to 5TB of storage for normal accounts, with unlimited options available if you call Google and negotiate with its salespeople. Google One, the consumer-level option for more Google storage, goes up to an incredible 30TB, which costs $150 a month. Drive also isn't just a Dropbox clone, as Google encourages developers to build the "Drive API" into their apps, giving developers an easy way to add cloud storage to their products.

The 5 million file cap applied to all of these people, and it was ridiculously small for most of Google's storage tiers. If you have all 4KB files, it's possible to hit 5 million files in about 20GB. For a time, Google was selling people storage they couldn't possibly use due to this new limit, and it wasn't documented anywhere.

In a reply to the rollback announcement tweet, Google added the understated line of the century: "If we need to make changes, we will communicate them to users in advance."

The complete lack of communication was pretty shocking. The original February thread on the Drive Issue Tracker is a sysadmin's nightmare, with users sharing stories like "We have a business-critical operational system in the animal health space which is currently affected by this. This is causing major disruption for tens of thousands of users in-practice and their work on a daily basis." Another user said, "This issue is currently affecting all of our sites across the UK, and we've been unable to use our full PMS integration due to this problem."

These issues could have been avoided if Google had simply communicated its plans.

The Google Workspace team, of which Drive is a part, knows how to run enterprise software. The group has a whole blog post and support article system where changes are often announced months in advance. Workspace business users get the option for a slower, more deliberate release schedule, and there is even a public calendar for Google Workspace feature releases. For some inexplicable reason, all those commonly used communication and rollout channels went out the window. This change was rolled straight into production with no warning, while admins were left scrambling to figure out what was wrong.

It's good that Google is rolling back this strange decision, but how did it happen in the first place? Why wasn't the standard operating procedure followed? Workspace is a product built on supporting business, and businesses want stability. It is inexcusable to break business setups on purpose without warning. Presumably, everyone on the Workspace team knows this, but somehow none of this institutional knowledge influenced Google's public actions.