Google offers possible fix after people’s Drive files mysteriously disappear

Complicated solution may bring files back from deletion

(Getty Images)

Google has offered an update and a solution after users of its Drive service reported that their files had gone mysteriously missing.

In recent days, some users of Drive said that their files had seemingly been deleted with no trace. Some reported that they had seemingly seen months of important documents disappear.

What’s more, they were warned that pressing a button that had initially been advised as a possible solution to the problem could actually cause even more issues.

Now Google has revealed what it says is a possible route to recovering those files, in an update on its support pages. It also said the issue only affected a “small subset” of users of a broken version of the Google Drive tool for desktop.

Unfortunately the fix requires a complicated series of steps that are not necessarily guaranteed to bring the files back. But it is at least a way of restoring those files, the company said.

The company advises users to download the latest desktop version of Google Drive onto their Mac or Windows PC, which includes a recovery tool. That is used by clicking on the Drive icon in the menu bar or system tray, pressing and holding the shift key and then clicking the settings cog, and choosing the “recover from backups” option.

That should start the process of recovering the files, and if it successful then a message will show, reading “recovery has started”. But it might also show a message reading “no backups found”, in which case those files might have been permanently lost.

If the backup begins successfully, then it will eventually show a message reading “recovery is complete”. If there isn’t enough space to recover the missing files, in which case an error message will show and users will have to delete some files and try again.

Google advises users to get in touch through its support pages if that resolution doesn’t work.