A growing number of users Google Drive reported a puzzling issue: their files suddenly appear to have disappeared, with the state of the cloud storage service appearing to have reverted back in time to May 2023. One of the first users to raise the issue, said that Drive seems lose files stored over time for 6 months now. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the activity history on Drive it does not show any changes, displaying operations carried out by the user last May.
Il Basket of the cloud storage service is also completely empty since deletion of any file is not required. The problem is the subject of several reports, even from users who have never shared or synchronized their files with other parties.
Loss of files on Google Drive: the company has highlighted the incident
At the moment Google does not yet seem to have taken an official position on the matter, at least publicly. However, a user reported a response received from the company’s technical support which confirms the existence of the problem and explains how the incident is currently the subject of a careful investigation.
In the support message, Google acknowledges that the user is not the only one affected by the Abnormal behavior on Drive. The company’s engineers are also investigating the causes of the problem but it is not possible to share one at the moment resolution date of the accident.
The only direct advice to users is not to make changes to the root folder of Google Drive and in general to the stored data, leaving time for Google engineers to understand the nature of the event in order to remedy it as quickly as possible.
The cloud, at least the traditional one, is not synonymous with secure storage
Once again, the incident that occurred at Google demonstrates how the cloud traditional cannot and should not be considered as a solution for data storage free from any type of problem. The 3-2-1 backup scheme suggests that at least one copy of the data is retained offsite, or outside the company perimeter. But the one stored on the cloud must absolutely not be the only one copy of the data. Situations of data loss or temporary inaccessibility of the same may however occur.
The Europen Cubbitfor example, allows you to create an anti-ransomware backup of the NAS and any data stored locally with a geo-distributed solution, which focuses on digital sovereignty and data control, which eliminates the possibility of losing data thanks toobject locking et al versioning. An approach that is completely missing from service providers today cloud storage traditional.
In the case of Google Drive, the advice is to use the Takeout service to create a complete copy of the data stored on the Mountain View company’s cloud.