Files.com supports many different integrations with a variety of cloud and on-premise platforms, as well as many different apps.

While Files.com does not limit the number of items allowed in a single folder, there are hard limits imposed by many clients and integrations, as well as soft limits imposed based on timeouts around how long a folder list is allowed to take when running through a third party integration.

Recommendation / Soft Limit

Our official recommendation to ensure the widest compatibility and support is to limit the number of items in a single folder to 10,000. This also ensures the highest level of performance via all of our apps. While you may find that higher numbers of items per folder may sometimes work, the number you should shoot for in order to receive support from our team is 10,000 items per folder.

The recommended max of 10,000 is the maximum amount that we guarantee will always work with high performance across all of our apps. Higher numbers may work, depending on the app being used. However, we do not recommend storing more than 10,000 files per folder.

One easy way to stay under the 10,000 item per folder limit is to divide up a folder's contents into subfolders. You can choose any division scheme that makes sense for your application, such as dividing by date, by customer, or even by filename prefix.

Consider using automatic file organization by file extension, creation date, modification date, or regular expression to move files from large folders into subfolders, creating smaller, more manageable collections.

Our Automations feature can be used to move files into subfolders on an hourly or daily basis.

Another method that may help to manage a folder's file count is the File Expiration folder setting. This feature will automatically delete files when they reach a specified age, so that older files that are no longer needed are automatically removed.

Hard Limits

The recommended maximum of 10,000 items is not a hard limit. In fact, there is no technical limit at all at the API, or via the Files.com CLI app.

However, some of our integration methods enforce their own hard limits. These integration methods are FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and Sync, and those hard limits are currently set to 100,000 per folder.

This means that no more than 100,000 files will be displayed or synced in a single folder via FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and Sync.

The 100,000 number does not apply to the API or CLI or the Desktop apps. There is no hard limitation on the desktop app currently, however, if you are planning on using the Desktop app, we strongly recommend staying well under 10,000 per folder.

Enterprise Options to Bypass Hard Limits

Files.com used to offer an Enterprise program to allow customers to bypass hard limits in exchange for a higher annual fee. After operating that program for nearly a decade, we have determined that it isn't economical to offer and have discontinued that program.

We would much rather have our customer success team work with your team to structure your files in a more scalable structure, and we are happy to do that instead.