Google backup and/or Gdrive wording is horrible. I think “delete everywhere” just made me lose a lot.
My scenario. It’s wordy but every single post I’ve seen asking the same question gets a totally different problem answered. Even the support is confused by what is happening to people like me. I really did search for a long time first
What nobody made clear, is that Gdrive backup isn’t like old Google Drive. It deletes the local files on my hard drive that should have had zero to do with GDrive. I backed them up, but I didn’t know they were actually physically deleted from the source. This is insane and the wording of every menu is not helpful. Even calling MY DRIVE the Google drive and the physical Hard drive.
Imagine if I used Microsoft Backup and had 4 backups. When I deleted one, cloud, it deleted all the content of my hard drive. Or imagine if I deleted my UpDraft WordPress backup files from DropBox and the web site vanished forever. (Real insane analogy)
My Scenario:
I uninstalled Google drive and installed Gdrive backup on Windows.
Wording confused me so I guess I backup up absolutely everything from several folders to the drive. It took a few days.
I look on Gdrive and I see no hint of any files except the photos for the last 15 years in folders with no directories. This practically useless for using day to day, but fine for a backup – That’s a different issue I’m not complaining about.
I am backing up photos and videos using the free storage method cheering how wonderful it is, but somehow within a day, I am full of my 100gb paid storage. I’m surprised.
I can find no hint why or where the 97gb is hidden. I read everything on both the Google backup, and both web based and windows based Google Drive. I have no idea why nothing is backup up except pictures and a few very tiny files and my 100bg is full. The help wording directions is confusing what am I syncing there and what am I syncing here?
Eventually, I find clicking “100gb of 100gb” displays a new hidden menu and page I would not normally know to look for and it shows me something called Quota and a number of files that are not locatable on my backup more Gdrive. Some are really big backup files. All sorts of directories I discover are from a work folder that was inside my pictures folder. I did not find word of this in help, aided by the huge inconvenience that Google never deletes forums that are more than 2 years old and relevant to versions from 2012, and the current pleas for help I eventually locate with cries of URGENT all answer the wrong problem.
So… I delete the hidden folders of all the things I don’t need to have it back up, especially given they seem invisible. I delete merrily anything searching 8ZIP will bring up, or the Quota files that I never wanted to back up anyway. Then, because BIN counts against my 100gb, I empty the bin. I know my count might not go down for 24 hours. I did read that somewhere.
Next thing I know, it has deleted the actual physical folders and files from my local hard drive. Not the Gdrive. Not the backup… The actual files from my physical hard drive. Every last one. Gone, and gone from BIN.
BAM I lost my work folder. five years work.
WOW.
I search some other things like EXE or PDF and fine more hidden files I don’t need on the Gdrive. Things that I don’t need access to on my other 3 computers or tablets. but absolutely no way to determine where they are on my hard drive. In fact, not even a hint where they might be on a different computer… just that Gdrive has them somewhere, inaccessible unless I know their specific filename to search, or oddly – if I RE-ADD it to Gdrive a second time to so it stands alone in a visible folder, see it, and then download it.
That can’t possibly be right. DELETE EVERYWHERE has to be a lot clearer since everyone is familiar with how hard drive backups work. They don’t fiddle with your source files. EVER.
I am sad I am so confused. I can not recommend this to anyone. They might delete their entire hard drive. I remember in Windows 3.1 when clients used to see their folders and also their folders in the network share and delete one. Bad things.
Summary: I have a Gdrive of 100GB I can’t use, and a hard drive 98GB smaller than it was yesterday, and a huge number of files I have to search old 2017 hard drive for to restore what I can from a legit backup I did in October.
weep weep.
