Some Google Drive users are reporting seeing the files they had stored on the cloud storage service mysteriously disappear. Google has warned Google Drive users not to disconnect their account within the Google Drive for desktop app.
Users on Google’s community support site began complaining of the issue last week. Some users report six months of data has vanished.
The initial poster described the issue:
Hi, my Google Drive files suddenly disappeared. The Drive literally went back to condition in May 2023. data from May until today disappeared, and the folder structure went back to status in May.
Google Drive activity doesn’t show any changes (only show activity that was in May)No files was deleted manually, so no files in Trash. I never sync or shared my files and drive to anyone, I used the drive locally.
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. I reported the issue to the Google support team probably in States and they ask me to report the issue to their engineer. But no answer from the engineer and cannot know whether they are reviewing my issue.
I used the drive few days ago and last morning this horrible problem happened.
Very devastating and the files are very important to me. needs any help to fix the problem.
thanks in advance for any helps
As reported by The Register, one user says they logged into Google Drive to find the state of their files as they were in May 2023. Everything saved since that date was gone, despite attempts by Google’s support team to help them recover the files. The complaint thread of complaints currently has 286 users who clicked the “I have the same question.”
The Google Drive team has posted that it is “investigating reports of an issue impacting a limited subset of Drive for desktop users.”
In the meantime, Google warns:
- 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 - Makea copy of the app data folder if there’s space on your hard drive
We’ll update this article if we learn more.
