Mass deletion of Google Cloud Documents (GDocs, GSheets, etc)

#1

I renamed synced folder locally, and to my surprise insync deleted this on google drive then re-uploaded it. In the process every single Google Cloud Document in that folder has been deleted. To add insult to injury though they exist in Google Drive’s bin, they do not list on searches - e.g. “:trashed” produces no result.

They can be found in Google Drive bin only by searching their contents (not their name or path). In that scenario they cannot be restored directly (presumable as their parent folder handle is no longer valid). The only way to recover them is to open them then follow the offer to ‘restore’, then move them somewhere.

This behaviour is dangerous given it affects cloud documents which are often not otherwise synced.

Any suggestions on how I can get all these files back? I have contacted Google directly also to see if they can help.

#2

Happy to say I found my files. I made a mistake when searching on Google Drive - the key is ‘is:trashed’, rather than what I was typing. They were thus retrievable after all.

Nonetheless it was an unpleasant surprise to see so many such files had ‘disappeared’ due to a folder rename.

1 Like
#3

Hi Richard, I’m so sorry for this. When a folder is renamed locally, it doesn’t automatically reflect on Insync. So since in Insync, the folder is still old name, it thought it lost the location it was syncing. We’re still developing this feature for Insync 3 (as it was available in 1.5)

#4

We will make sure to make pre-cautions on this in order to avoid this from happening.

#5

Hi @Richard_Ibitoye, cross-posting a response from another thread:

Thanks for reporting this @Emillynge24. This sounds like a potential bug – Insync should bring up an error message if you renamed your base folder while it’s not running.

Tried it on my Mac:
43%20PM

It also shouldn’t have deleted your files. We’ll investigate this! If you haven’t already, please send an email to support@insynchq.com with your log files as it may help with the investigation.

#6

Hi @Richard_Ibitoye

I just wanted to inform you that we just released 3.0.28 here.

Please note that there are no autoupdates and this is not in the Linux repos yet since it’s an early Forums release.