How to Solve Airtable Attachment Storage Limits Without Touching Your Existing Setup

You are using Airtable for your business. For your operations, you need to store a lot of PDF files for contracts and project documents. Everything has been running smoothly and your workflow feels solid.

Then suddenly you hit the attachment storage limit. Now you cannot add any attachments and you cannot upload new files. Work stops immediately and you need a solution.

So you contact Airtable support hoping for a quick fix. What they suggest is that you create a new base and start creating new records there so that the new base does not have the attachment limit. This way, you can continue uploading contracts and project documents into that fresh base.

You already have a complete setup running in your existing base. All the automations, synced tables, views, and logic you have built will not automatically transfer to the new base.

You will need to rebuild everything from scratch. And then you will end up maintaining two different bases. You will need to sync data between them, manage updates in both places, and deal with duplicate work. That becomes extremely messy and time-consuming.

This is not something you want to do, especially when your current system is already working very well.

So the question is how do you solve this in a better way without touching your existing setup.

Understanding Airtable Attachment Limits

Airtable has a limit on how much attachment storage you can use based on your plan. Free, Team, Business, and Enterprise each come with different caps.

If you are storing a lot of PDFs or images, you will eventually reach the limit. So once you hit the cap, Airtable will not allow you to upload any further files.

So you need a better strategy for storing your files. A strategy that keeps your base light and does not consume the attachment limit.

Use an Automation to Offload Files to Cloud Storage

One of the best solutions is to let Airtable store only the link instead of storing the actual attachment. Here is how it works.

Whenever you upload a contract into Airtable, an automation triggers. That automation uploads the file to Google Drive or Dropbox. Then it removes the attachment from Airtable and pastes the share link back into the record.

So now all the storage sits in Drive or Dropbox and Airtable does not fill up. You never reach the limit and all your automations continue to run the same way.

This is the simplest and most reliable long term solution.

If You Want to Keep Files While Working on a Project

If you do not want to move the attachments immediately and you prefer to keep everything inside Airtable while the project is ongoing, then there is another option for you.

You keep the attachments inside Airtable while the project is open and ongoing. Then when the project finishes or the deal closes, you click an Archive button.

That triggers an automation that moves all attachments from that record into Google Drive or Dropbox. It stores the link back inside Airtable and removes the original files.

This way you avoid reaching the attachment limit and you can continue working without interruptions.

If you need help setting up the automation, I have written a detailed article on how to take attachments from Airtable, upload them to Google Drive through automation, get the shared link back, and store that link inside Airtable.

The same setup works for Dropbox as well. You only need to adjust the section where the automation connects to the storage service. Everything else remains the same.