Be careful if you store your files in Google Drive! A nasty bug has caused months of backups to disappear for many users, for no apparent reason. Fortunately, Google has found the solution.
In recent days, many Google Drive users have discovered, completely panicked, that several months – if not several years! – data disappeared without warning, without them having carried out any particular manipulations. Google investigated the problem, as it promised, and finally appears to have found the cause. Thus, the Internet giant published a message on November 27 on its support forum, indicating that the problem would be with the service’s desktop application, without further details. Although he has not yet found a solution, he nevertheless provided some advice to avoid the worst until the problem is definitively resolved.
Google Drive bug: months of work gone up in smoke
Storing your data in the cloud, through services like Google Drive, is very convenient and very fast, and ensures that you can access your documents from any device. Also, if your trusty computer were to break down, you would not lose anything. But relying solely on the cloud would be a mistake, because if the service fails, your data will go up in smoke. Many Internet users have had the bitter experience of this, as shown by the various testimonies that flood into the Google help forum. Several of them lost months of work stored on the company’s cloud, for no apparent reason.
“Hello, my Google Drive files suddenly disappeared. The Drive literally reverted to its state in May 2023. The data from May to today is gone and the folder structure reverted to its state in May”explains a South Korean Internet user in a message posted on November 22. In another posta user indicates that his Drive has made his documents from the last two years disappear and seems to have returned to 2021. Others testify having lost five months of workmore besides eight months. In short, this is not an isolated problem.
Google Drive bug: hence the need to have several backups
Data saved in Google Drive from there is simply accessible. The files do not appear to have been manually deleted since the Recycle Bin itself is affected by this bug and does not contain any files created over the past six months. No technical explanation seems to justify this sudden loss of data. The Mountain View firm responded to several complaints. “This issue is currently under investigation by our product engineers and we are also awaiting root cause analysis, as well as how we can resolve this issue”, the company told one of the victims of this technical problem a few days ago. She also advised “do not make changes to the root folder“ of Drive before getting feedback from the engineers working on the problem.
Since then, the Internet giant seems to have identified the problem. “We are investigating reports of an issue affecting a limited subset of Drive desktop users and will follow up with further updates,” he explains in his post. At this time, no fixes have been deployed. Now we just have to hope that the company has kept backups of these files somewhere! In the meantime, she offers some recommendations to prevent such a problem from happening to you. Also, do not disconnect your account from Google Drive desktop, or delete or move the Drive data folder. This is located in two different locations, depending on your exploration system:
- On Windows: C: / Users / username / AppData / Local / Google / DriveFS
- On Mac: Library / Application Support / Google / DriveFS
In short, don’t touch anything and make a copy of all your files stored on Drive on a hard drive. To do this, go to Google Takeout to export your Drive data and receive a download link by email.
This is not the first time that data has mysteriously disappeared from the Internet giant’s servers. Already in 2011, thousands of Gmail users lost some of their messages and contacts. Fortunately, it was only temporary! Also, we can never repeat it enough, but multiply the backups of your data on several media! The best is to make three different copies, one of which is outside your home – to avoid losing everything in the event of a burglary, for example.