I encountered an error yesterday with Dropbox that I’ve not seen before, and couldn’t find anyone else talking about: when I Googled the error message – it returned no results.

The error is “This folder has too many files to share at once. Please move some files out, try a subfolder, or contact support for assistance.”

I did indeed contact support, but as it was a Saturday, I’m still waiting on a response. I was trying to share about 100,700 files. Thinking it might be a 100,000 limit, I zipped about 6,500 files into an archive but got the same error with ~95,000 files. FYI They are spread across many hundreds of folders within that single folder.

No idea as yet what Dropbox will do about this – maybe they can do a forced share from their end, maybe you simply can’t share that many files in a single folder at once.

UPDATE: Dropbox replied to my support ticket 3 working days later and said:

Thanks for writing in, and I’m sorry for the frustration you’ve experienced. It appears you are trying to create a shared folder from a folder that already contains a very large number of files. As you mentioned, this can often result in an error.

The simple workaround is to create and share a new empty folder in your Dropbox and then move all of the files from the existing folder into the new shared folder. This error only affects the creation of a shared folder and won’t affect future invitations to the folder.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I hope this clarifies things.

Best,