Update 30/11/23:
Late yesterday, 29 November, the same Google support member who initially said the company was investigating the issue, posted an update to the Google Drive support forum. The post mostly serves to keep the “small subset” of affected users in the loop, saying the issue has now been identified as a problem for “Drive for desktop users on version 84, which only affected local file changes that had yet to be synced to Drive.”
The update post didn’t come with instructions for a fix, though one is expected “to be available in the next few days.” In the meantime, affected users are urged to keep their hands in their pockets and continue not touching anything.
Original story:
It turns out ‘the cloud’ isn’t as robust as you thought. Recently, there have been reports that Google Drive users are experiencing mysteriously missing files from their cloud. If you’ve suffered a similar fate, the current recommendation is… to do nothing. Google is looking into it, apparently.
A South Korean user first reported on Google’s Support Forum that they had a problem accessing files in their Google Drive on 22 November 2023. Specifically, any uploaded data from May 2023 to the day they posted was gone and their Drive had reverted to a state from May.
Google Drive used Vanish, it was very successful
For this unfortunate user, checking Google Drive’s activity log didn’t help either. It only showed activity for the reverted May 2023 state. Contacting Google’s support team also proved fruitless as none of the troubleshooting steps they suggested resulted in any meaningful changes or the restoration of the missing data.
“I followed recovery process that Google support team ask me to (South Korea team). They put a recovery program and failed. ask me to backup and restore DriveFS folder, nothing changed,” wrote the user.
Many of the 35 replies to the original post reported the same problem, 375 people selected the “I have the same question” tag, the post features a “This post is a trending issue” comment stuck at the top, and there have been other similar posts made about the same problem. So it doesn’t seem like an isolated incident or a case of user error.
Thankfully, a member of Google’s support team eventually chimed in to provide an update on the situation. But that was two days ago and didn’t inspire confidence.
We’re investigating reports of an issue impacting a limited subset of Drive for desktop users and will follow up with more updates. In the meantime:
- Do not click “Disconnect account” within Drive for desktop
- Do not delete or move the app data folder:
- Windows: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\DriveFS
- macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS
- Optional: If you have room on your hard drive, we recommend making a copy of the app data folder.
Thanks,
The Google Drive team.
Read More: Hard drives vs cloud storage for business backups
Whether this problem can be fixed and the affected files restored or not, this is a great example of why backup redundancies are considered best practice.
We’ll update this story when something changes. Let’s hope it’s for the better.