Dropbox rate limit for folder/file retrieval

chetanavjk

My team is using Dropbox API to fetch and search for files and folders. While there is pagination, it is unclear as to how many more items are available and how many more calls needs to be made to retrieve the same.There is a possibility to have, say, a million files. Is there a rate limit to the numbers of calls made while using get and search APIs including ListFolderAsync API. 

 

 

Does the rate limit differ for free and paid accounts (my team is on Dropbox Business Advanced plan) 

Greg-DB

The Dropbox API does have a general rate limiting system that applies the same to all account types and API endpoints, but we don't have specific rate numbers documented for that, and we cannot increase the limits for any particular app, user, or team. Apps should be written to handle these rate limit responses automatically. Also note that not all responses with a 429 or 503 status code indicate explicit rate limiting, but in any case that you get a response with 429 or 503 status code the best practice is to retry the request, respecting the Retry-After header if given in the response, or using an exponential back-off, if not. I recommend referring to the error documentation and Error Handling Guide for more information.

 

And as you found, the ListFolder/ListFolderContinue interface is paginated in order to support listing the contents of a folder, regardless of how many files are in the folder total. By using these endpoints as documented, you can list any number of files without running in to the rate limits.