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API metadata rate‑limit lockout during large backup — please advise

Benjamin Gordon

Hi Dropbox Support,

I'm on a 3 TB plan and I'm backing up a large music‑production library (~1.2 TB, ~130,000 files) to my Dropbox using rclone.

After several backup runs today, my account's metadata/listing API appears heavily rate‑limited: a request to list even my 8 top‑level folders returns nothing after 20+ seconds (normally instant), and rclone lists 0 objects in 60 seconds. Uploads themselves still work and connectivity is fine — it's specifically folder‑listing/metadata calls that are throttled to a standstill.

Could you help with:

Is my account currently under a metadata/API rate‑limit penalty, and when will it reset?
Can the limit be raised for a legitimate one‑time 1 TB+ backup?
What's the recommended way to run a large initial backup via the API (request rates, batch settings, using my own API app) without tripping these limits?

I'm not doing anything abusive, just backing up a studio library. Any guidance appreciated.

Thanks,
Ben

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Mark

I have moved this to https://community.dropbox.com/en/categories/dropbox-api-support-feedback as its more liklely to get a response :)

Benjamin Gordon

thanks

Benjamin Gordon

bump

Greg-DB

The Dropbox API does have a general rate limiting system that applies to all account types, 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. The limits apply to all apps/users, so registering your own app would not avoid the limits. I recommend referring to the error documentation and Error Handling Guide for more information.

Additionally, there is a specific limit for uploads to some Dropbox team plans of "1 billion API calls/month" for "data transport" noted here. This is a limit on the number of upload API calls that can be made per team per month, for certain Dropbox team plans only. Note that this only applies to upload calls, and not other types of calls. You can find more information on this limit in the developer documentation here.

Note that this is something that would need to be handled by the programmer of the app, so if you are not the programmer responsible for this integration, you may need to contact them for support.