Recovering Google Drive documents

July 31, 2012 8:37 AM

In a stunning act of incompetence this morning, I emptied the trash on Google Drive. I have now lost access to anything I originally uploaded.

I ran out of space on my Google Drive account. Not wanting to upgrade, I copied all the contents of the drive to my local machine--or so I thought. Apparently, I copied *links* to the documents in question, not the actual documents. I then emptied the Google Drive trash, clearly not knowing that I was deleting the only copy of the documents. I thought they were still stored locally.

I have links for forms, spreadsheets, and documents, but the links are all .gsheets or .gdocs and say there is no preview available with a download link. The download link just re-opens the same page with none of the data.

If I'm reading this page correctly, I'm completely screwed. Is there any hope of me recovering this stuff, or should I just quit my job today?

posted by kellyk801 to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Just to make sure... You deleted all of the files after you (thought) you copied them to your computer and then you emptied the trash? (Or, like one of my clients once did, you stored all of your files in the trash folder?)

Emptying the trash in and of itself shouldn't remove any files that hadn't already been deleted. If you did delete your files and then emptied the trash, then your files are permanently gone (as far as you're concerned anyway). The only possible exception is if your Google Drive account was part of a paid Google Apps account.
posted by GnomeChompsky at 8:59 AM on July 31, 2012

Best answer: So, you -

1. Ran out of space on your Google Drive account.

2. Copied the contents of your Google Drive account to your local machine (except instead just copied pointers to these files to your local machine).

3. Dumped the contents of your Google Drive account to the trash.

4. Emptied the trash.

I'm so terribly sorry. I think you are completely and totally hosed, unless you had share access with someone else and that other person at some point downloaded some or all of the contents to a local system, which seems like an unlikely stretch. I would not quit your job. I would go get some ice cream.

If it helps, which it doesn't, it's helpful to me to know that deletion is so permanent in the context of Google Drive.
posted by kbanas at 9:00 AM on July 31, 2012 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I'm afraid kbanas has it. I'm going for ice cream for lunch and may not come back until Thursday.

Also let this serve as a lesson to the masses: Google Drive is not for the faint of heart.
posted by kellyk801 at 9:36 AM on July 31, 2012 [2 favorites]

To pick up that thought, Dropbox keeps an infinite history of deleted documents. That might be better for you if you think this could happen again.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 9:50 AM on July 31, 2012 [2 favorites]

Well, too late now, but don't depend on GDrive to do backups for you. Perform them yourself, to entirely separate "media" (to local drive, to S3, etc.). This is not dissimilar to the argument that RAID is not backup.
posted by chengjih at 9:59 AM on July 31, 2012

I don't know anything about GDrive, but if the files at one point existed locally on your hard drive, you could try running an undelete program to see if you can recover them.
posted by cosmic.osmo at 11:17 AM on July 31, 2012

Googler here. Have you try contacting Google support? I don't work on Drive so I don't know what can and cannot be recovered, but we might be able to help you.

Please email support and let me know what happens.
posted by jrockway at 11:56 AM on July 31, 2012 [1 favorite]

I would contact support too, but Google is on the hook so much on privacy I'm betting they're erring on the side of extreme caution and completely eradicating anything that the user requests to be deleted from their systems as soon as possible.
posted by zixyer at 12:58 PM on July 31, 2012

Recuva can help you recover deleted files if they're still intact on the original drive where they were first created or temporarily stored. (direct download).
posted by samsara at 1:54 PM on July 31, 2012

Quick note: If you created the files within Google Docs/Drive (i.e. not on a computer with Word/Excel) then data recovery programs like Recuva won't help.
posted by GnomeChompsky at 1:57 PM on July 31, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks for the additional responses. I do have copies of anything that wasn't created within Google Docs/Drive from last night's backup (which is done locally, not on google drive). I use the drive almost exclusively for collaborative documents or things I want access to from any computer I'd need to use on campus. It's only the docs created within Google that I've lost, so I'm not completely and totally hosed. Just, you know, like 43% hosed.

I emailed google drive support as jrockway suggested just to see what happens. I'm not hopeful that they'll have some magic answer for me, as I suspect zixyer is right on their deletion policy, but who knows? It also appears that had I been a paying customer, I may have more recourse with support, but that's not entirely clear.
posted by kellyk801 at 3:35 PM on July 31, 2012