Deano’s answer to: “Why is Dropbox space limited to 100GB?”

Update, 4/30/2011:

It is now possible to sign up for Dropbox Teams (http://dropbox.com/teams), a service that allows for pooled storage shared by multiple Dropbox users, which scales well beyond the 100GB individual account limit.

Specific pricing as of today is:

• 350GB and 5 users for $795/year
• $125/year per additional user (no additional storage)
• $200/year per 100GB additional storage

There appears to be no limitation that requires Dropbox Teams be used by a set number of users – a single user could, in theory, purchase as much storage as desired, and use the Teams account as a "really big" individual account.

—————– deprecated, but awesome-for-its-time answer follows ———–

Technically, it's not. In theory, you can PAY for 100GB, and then keep referring additional new users to add to your cap.

Practically speaking, that's just not a viable solution for a business, especially one looking to double the cap, or up it by a factor of 10+.

So, the question then becomes "if I'm allowed to have multiple 100GB accounts, why can't I have one 200GB account?" The answer to that is a bit simpler – you're simply not the target market for Dropbox right now. While Dropbox claims to be looking into solutions in their FAQ ( https://www.dropbox.com/help/160 ), since no movement has been taken on this in over a year, it's clearly not a high priority, and with good reason (for Dropbox).

Dropbox aims to improve sharing and syncing of files for individuals and teams, rather than for the enterprise. 100GB is a good cut off to help dissuade larger companies from relying on Dropbox for their cloud storage needs, since Dropbox storage is NOT guaranteed for backup/disaster recovery/etc… It's running on top of Amazon's S3 storage, and basically at the mercy of whatever Amazon's policies are in that regard.

If you're really interested in cloud storage greater than 100GB, you should read up on "What are Dropbox's major competitors?", which will point you at a few alternatives that operate similarly (SugarSync, in particular, seems to have near-identical features, if clunkier UI).

As a former IT Director, I spent a lot of time thinking about this possibility as a way to "farm out" storage to accomodate the needs of an army of external freelancers. Eventually, I realized I was probably thinking about things a bit backwards – even for a fairly large organization, 100GB can accomodate a great deal of "active" storage. By using Dropbox as the file transfer/sync point for remote and local workers for projects in play ONLY (basically the original intent of the product), and then syncing everything to a secondary server to handle additional versioning/ageing out of older/archive data, you can achieve the best of both worlds – potentially unlimited total storage (even using other cloud solutions if you like), combined with the speed and simplicity of Dropbox.

This type of hybrid setup also gives a nice spread of providers/points of failure, so that if Dropbox experiences an outage, you'll still have access to the data via another local/cloud server… And if you lose your secondary server, it will only affect older/completed projects, not your active working files.

Why is Dropbox space limited to 100GB?