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Best Practices for large numbers of files, when selective sync is not an option

I manage Dropbox for a small business and they have about 1.3 million files in their account. I've asked them if they can reduce the number of files and they are not able to. Nor are the employees (there are a dozen) able to selectively sync, they all need everything all the time.

When setting up a new computer it can take a week to sync dropbox, and sometimes even then it will not complete. I've had better luck seeding the dropbox folder with the full file set before running dropbox for the first time. What other kinds of techniques can help?

These are all Windows 10/11 PCs.

Apologies if this is in the wrong section, and thank you for your advice.

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Comments

Jay

Hi @CrankyD, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Are the files all needed to made available local on their machines, so they can't mark any as online-only?

Could you clarify in a little more detail as to why every single file is necessary for the users to be able to access at any moment?

This info will help me to assist further!

CrankyD

Thanks for your response.

I asked management if they could identify sections that we could leave online only and they said there were none.

Hannah

Hey @CrankyD, if all files in the Dropbox folder need to stay available offline at all times, there's not much we can suggest.

They can take a look at this article, to make sure that the bandwidth that Dropbox uses is not limited, so that syncing works as fast as possible.

Other than that, they need to keep in mind that the performance of the Dropbox application will decline after reaching 300K files.

You can read more about this here.

CrankyD

Thank you for the reply.

If nothing else, perhaps this post can help others with the one thing that has worked: seeding the Dropbox folder with the complete file set.

In this office, each workstation has an internal drive dedicated to Dropbox. I’ve noticed when waiting for Dropbox to make its initial sync that HDD activity is at 100%. I wonder how much difference a SSD would make, if any?

Rich

@CrankyD wrote:
I wonder how much difference a SSD would make, if any?

It would make a huge difference during the indexing and writing process, though 1.3 million files would still take a very long time. The number of files Dropbox can handle is largely based on the specs of the computer, but on average you'll see performance decline beyond 300,000 files.

CrankyD

Thank you. I may try a SSD. If so I’ll report back the difference.

Megan

Definitely keep us on the loop @CrankyD!