Folder Limitations

Files.com integrates with a wide range of cloud platforms, on-premise platforms, and third-party apps. Folder size limits come from those integrations, not from Files.com itself.

Files.com does not limit the number of items in a single folder. Many clients and integrations enforce their own hard limits, and others impose soft limits based on how long a folder list is allowed to take before timing out.

Recommendation / Soft Limit

Our official recommendation is to keep each folder under 10,000 items. That is the threshold we guarantee will work with high performance across every Files.com app, and it is the number to target if you want support from our team to cover the configuration. Higher counts often work depending on the app, but we do not recommend storing more than 10,000 files in a single folder.

The simplest way to stay under 10,000 items per folder is to divide the contents into subfolders. Any scheme that fits your workflow works — by date, by customer, by filename prefix, or anything else that produces an even split.

You can also use automatic file organization by file extension, creation date, modification date, or regular expression to move files from large folders into subfolders. Our Automations feature can run that organization on an hourly or daily schedule.

The File Expiration folder setting is another way to keep folder counts down. It automatically deletes files once they reach a specified age, so older files that are no longer needed are removed without manual intervention.

Hard Limits

The 10,000-item recommendation is not a hard limit. There is no technical limit at the API or the Files.com CLI app.

Some integration methods do enforce their own hard limits. FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and Sync are currently capped at 100,000 items per folder, which means no more than 100,000 files will be displayed or synced in a single folder through those methods.

The 100,000-item cap does not apply to the API, the CLI, or the Desktop app. The Desktop app has no hard limit today, but if you plan to use it, we strongly recommend staying well under 10,000 items per folder.

Enterprise Options to Bypass Hard Limits

Files.com used to offer an Enterprise program that let customers bypass these hard limits in exchange for a higher annual fee. After running that program for nearly a decade, we determined it was not economical to maintain and have discontinued it.

We would rather have our support team work with you to restructure your files into a more scalable layout, and we are happy to do that instead.