Hi! I installed odrive to a coworkers computer and it used up over a 1TB of her memory…Which her computer isn’t even that big…we share a lot (over 300)of google drive folders on our odrives. So I uninstalled it and actually trashed a ton of our shared google drive folders!!! I have never experienced this with odrive and I am wondering what in the world happened. I have uninstalled odrive multiple times on other computers and this has never happened…PLEASE HELP!
Hi @faithg,
Thanks for reaching out. I’m sorry to hear you are having issues.
We use special files that do not take up any physical space, but will represent their space in Finder or Explorer. I go over it a bit in this video here (linked to 0:58 where I talk about placeholders): https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=58&v=U3yVCtOcZTM
When odrive is uninstalled it will exit the application and be uninstalled is such a way as to not delete any data. The odrive folder is actually renamed to a backup folder name. This means that an uninstall should never result in deleting data, especially on the remote side because odrive isn’t running anymore and can’t send any commands to Google Drive.
- Maybe something else was going on in this case?
- Can you provide some additional details on specifically what was deleted (the paths) and when?
- Did these folders end up in the Google Trash?
Google keeps track of activity in the drive, so you should be able to see what happened with these folder from the Google Drive web client. This might be able to provide more information on what actions were taken and by whom.
Use the “information” icon on the Google Drive web client.
For history on your entire drive, make sure you click on “My Drive” on the left side and then the “i” icon on the right side and select “Activity”
This page has more information on these Google Drive features:
Went through storage in the settings and optimized the drive and then uninstalled from there at around 10:20 am. I have looked in the Google Drive “i” icon and saw exactly when the files were deleted and it was when I uninstalled from angelaw@advcc.org. But the action is showing that the google drive deleted it and not from her computer. As soon as the deletion was done all of our team members got this message. The weird thing is that it didn’t delete all files within the drive it is very random on which ones deleted.
Hi @faithg,
Thanks for the additional information.
Based on the screenshot above it seems like something else was doing these deletes. odrive actually can’t delete a Google Docs file, such as the Sheets file shown in the screenshot above. When you try you get an error like this:
Additionally, under most circumstances, odrive is not allowed to delete shared items. You end up getting an error like this:
This is a file I actually have “edit” permissions to, in that I can edit the file and upload the change. However, Google does not allow deleting a shared file that you so not explicitly own and returns a “No permissions” error if you attempt to do so.
- Is it possible there other software on her system that could’ve been interacting with Google Drive?
Was this using the defragmentation feature in Windows 10? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/defragment-your-windows-10-pc-048aefac-7f1f-4632-d48a-9700c4ec702a
Hi @faithg,
I just wanted to follow-up on this.
Were you able to determine if there could be some other software that was interacting with Google, or any other information on the sequence of events that may have triggered what you saw?
Perhaps the drive optimization that was done caused some unexpected results on these files?