Google Drive’s Amazing Disappearing Files And Folders

Alphabet’s Advice Is Not To Mess With Your Files While They Work

A number of users were dismayed over the weekend to discover that many of the files they have saved to Google Drive are no longer there.  The disappearance is not completely random, it seems that only files created in the last six months have been affected.  That is a definite inconvenience for personal users trying to access their recent documents, but is horrific for those businesses that depend on Google’s corporate version.  This will lead to some difficult conversations as the final quarter of 2023 comes to a close and critical documents are no longer available to work on or send to clients.

Google doesn’t have a solution, nor a root cause as of yet but they do have some advice.  They ask users not to make too many changes to their root folder while their engineers work to resolve the issue as that could interfere with their restoration process.  For those that cannot wait for the proper resolution there is a link over at The Register that leads to a solution that has worked for some.  This is not an official fix, so you should exercise caution if you intend to apply it as there could be unforeseen consequences.  

Hopefully you have some backups somewhere other than Google Drive, if not you might want to consider how you deal with cloud storage next year.