Maximum number of files that the Windows client can handle?

šŸ“± Desktop & mobile clients šŸ’» Desktop
1

Having a Dropbox of approximately 1.8 TB of total size with approx. 900,000 files, the Windows 10 Dropbox client cannot handle it anymore (it crashes with too much memory consumption). Their support also told me I have too many files to sync them all.

Now Iā€™m planning on switching to a (self-hosted) Nextcloud installation, together with the Windows 10 client of Nextcloud.

Currently I did not find any Nextcloud documentation or forum posting that gives me insights on whether my number of files is something that the Windows 10 client of Nextcloud can handle. Iā€™m estimating that the number of files may grow by ā‰ˆ50,000 per year.

My question:

Is there any (practical) limit on the number of files that the Windows 10 client of Nextcloud can handle?

2

The client itself can probably handle it but your server is going to have to be configured correctly for it.

1 Like
3

Thanks, my scenario is not having lots of files in one folder. Instead they usually are rather well distributed among several folders, like e.g.:

Photos
Photos / 2018
Photos / 2018 / 01
ā€¦

I do think, I will give it a try and see how the client behaves.

4

Hi, I hope you are well, Iā€™m just curious if you went through with this test and how it worked out for you. I currently have a client that is a photographer as well and also has 2+ million files (Ā±25 TB) broken into various folders and sub-folders. I am encountering this same issue with Dropbox, as such, I am looking for a migration solution for them. I would love to use nextcloud and the computer I use for hosting is an absolute monster.

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5

Iā€™m still using Nextcloud since my initial posting. I figured out that Nextcloud also would be incredible slow for such a huge number of files to sync locally.

So I built a somewhat ā€œhybridā€ approach:

  1. ā€œWorking folderā€: I do have a small set of folders for my daily work that is synchronized with the Windows client of Nextcloud.
  2. ā€œArchive folderā€: I do have a full archive of all files not in the ā€œworking folderā€ in a separate folder on my local Windows HDD. This folder is synchronized weekly with rclone between my Nextcloud server and the ā€œarchive folderā€ on my local HDD.

In my scenario, Nextcloud is a tool both for working with a smaller set of files (inside the ā€œworking folderā€) and for archiving my iPhone images to Nextcloud (finally being moved to the ā€œarchive folderā€).

Iā€™m using batch scripts to regularly move files from my ā€œworking folderā€ to the ā€œarchive folderā€ and batch scripts for synchronizing the ā€œarchive folderā€ with Nextcloud via rclone.

rclone is an exceptionally reliable tool for me.

So Iā€™m not sure whether my scenario fits for your needs.

In addition, I use rclone to back up my Nextcloud files from my local HDD ā€œarchive folderā€ to Amazon AWS S3 every now and then. I also do backups to physical external USB HDD drives to put them in my bank safe deposit box.