Data Disappearing for Google Drive Users: Company Investigating!
Google has officially acknowledged an issue affecting Google Drive that causes users’ data to disappear from the cloud.
Google notes that the company is “currently investigating reports of an issue affecting a limited subset of Drive for desktop users” and will provide updates soon. In addition, the search giant has highlighted key points that need to be taken into account until this issue is resolved.
How to protect yourself from this problem according to Google
First, users are not allowed to click “Disconnect account” in Drive for Desktop. Second, users should not delete or move the following application data folders on Mac and Windows:
- macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS
- Windows: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\DriveFS
As an additional security measure, you can create a backup of the application data folder on a physical storage drive.
How this issue came up online
News of this mysterious disappearance was first reported by The Register when a user logged into Google Drive and found that their Drive status was the same as it was in May 2023, meaning all downloads made since then had disappeared. Despite several attempts, the user failed to recover any data.
“I followed the recovery process that Google support asked me to do (South Korea team). They did a recovery program and it failed. ask me to backup and restore the DriveFS folder, nothing changed. I reported the problem to Google support probably in the states and they ask me to report the problem to their engineer .But no response from an engineer and I can’t tell if they’re looking into my issue,” a user wrote on the Google Drive Community Forum.
Since then, several users have reported the same issue, with one user stating: “The same thing happened to me. I’m just shocked right now because the missing files are over 3 months ago. Our IT team is trying to contact Google support, but no solution yet . Hopefully the files can be recovered.”
