Google Drive trash items will be automatically deleted after 30 days | Hacker News Reader

Google Drive trash items will be automatically deleted after 30 days

gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com

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This is gonna suck for the people who store their important documents in the trash.

"I would have gladly released my tax returns but unfortunately it was saved in the trash folder"

a decidedly nonzero amount of people, vis a vi https://xkcd.com/1172/

It comes up regularly on the subreddit for tech support stories, /r/talesfromtechsupport. Just a few:

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/22ke8...

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/c24q2...

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/flgsn...

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/65cam...

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/bks9e...

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/9wrsc...

am dying of laughter, wtf is wrong with these people

> CW: Yes, I move them to the recycling bin to make them new again so I can reuse the files.

> IT: This is the trash bin, you would move files here to delete them off of your computer.

> CW: IT IS NOT A TRASH CAN, IT IS A RECYCLING BIN! IT SAYS SO RIGHT UNDER THE ICON!

Ok, now wait a second, why the hell is it called a recycling bin anyway?

"Recycling" doesn't mean "plan to throw this away later, but maybe I'll still grab it out of the trash can in case I made a mistake." Who came up with this metaphor?

Probably because "Trash" had already been taken by Mac OS.

Direct consequence of Microsoft stealing the paradigm from the Mac, where it has been called the "trash" since 1984.

> Microsoft stealing

The word you are looking for is "copying".

You can find all sorts of interesting stuff in the recycle bin! The garbage bin is much worse, everything is covered in food waste.

well at least once in my life I had accidentally deleted something important without backing it up (nobody's perfect) and I was glad I could recover it from the trash.

I'd honestly prefer if the policy would at least excempt reasonably small files or textfiles.

You have 30 days to recognize your mistake still with this new plan

That reminds me of my customers that used to put documents in C:\Temp

Let's face it. We've all been there.

My C:\temp is so full of stuff, some unknown amount of which turned out to be not as temp as I first thought, that I've now had to create C:\verytemp for the really temp stuff, which I make sure is emptied daily.

Some 20 years ago, when HD space was at a premium, I wrote a small script to clear out various temp directories in Windows 98. I tested the deployment on a colleague's computer, only to have him inform me that he used c:\temp as "temporary storage for projects I'm working on". Oh, well.

I actually have a tmp on my desktop for this very purpose :-)

If you go back far enough then calling GetTempPath() from the win32 API would return C:\Temp. It was always meant as a place for programs to put temporary files, not for users to stuff their garbage.

You joke, but I have seven git repository checkouts there right now. It’s a convenient place to put things I don’t want polluting my drive forever or being backed up, but need to exist on my filesystem at some point.

On Windows, you can make a temp folder in appdata/local and use that - local is specifically for files that don't get backed up. Actual temp folders can get deleted at any time.

Not a windows user. Is this directory automatically emptied on reboot or something?

No but various programs will store and delete files in the temporary folder. Also if you use the disk cleanup utility it will clear them out. I think from Windows XP onwards it was moved out of the root to somewhere somewhat harder to find.

Of course it was never meant as a place to store users files temporarily, it was always for programs that needed to write a temporary file.

That reminds me of the early days of me doing sysadmin.

We had a BSD system and an Ultrix system. For convenience I temporarily NFS mounted the root of the Ultrix system into /tmp/foo on the BSD machine. After I was done I forgot to umount the volume.

The next day, the Ultrix machine behaved really weird. Things seemed to work fine, but a lot of files were missing. It took a bit of troubleshooting before we figured out what had happened.

As it turns out, the nightly /tmp cleanup script had run on the BSD machine, and this script deleted all files which had not been accessed in a week. Of course the script had traversed the NFS mount and cleaned up everything on the root disk of the other machine. This meant that all the files that were commonly used were still there, so things seemed fine until you tried to do anything that involved files that hadn't been touched in the last week.

That's when I learned never to use /tmp for anything important.

Anyone impacted by this who needs a new cloud-scale trash service should check out https://devnull-as-a-service.com.

This is a joke, but a real service like this could be neat. For example, it listens on all ports and returns a "null" response based on the typical service of that port.

Not-very-well-thought-out-examples:

http - Always returns 404.

https - Always returns 404.

ipp - Returns whatever IPP says for "printer not found" or equivalent.

lpd - Takes data, does nothing with it.

dns - Always returns NXDOMAIN.

ident - Always returns nobody:nogroup

telnet - Accepts any username/password/credentials, returns "This account is not available" and immediately exits.

ssh - Accepts any username/password/credentials, returns "This account is not available" and immediately exits.

smtp - Accepts message, doesn't do anything with it.

pop3/imap - Accepts any login, always has 0 messages.

irc - Accepts any nick, PRIVMSG or other commands, commands don't actually do anything. Returns null list of channels and users when queried.

vnc - ?

rdp - ?

Etc.

Considering that /dev/null always reports success on read and write, I'd imagine that http(s) should give a 200 with no payload.

Like this? https://dilbert.com/strip/2003-11-13

I saw that earlier when I was looking in my drive and I was surprised that the trash hung around forever before this change! 30 days seems like a reasonable amount of time for something to stay there. I guess I just assumed things don't last forever after I trash them. I think ios does the same thing in the photos app?

Definitely just an "aligning reality with expectation" change. Most people probably assume their trash is occasionally cleared. It's arguably potentially problematic for them if they are keeping data around users asked them to trash.

Of course, when they first wrote this, I imagine keeping trash indefinitely had a nearly nonexistent impact on the bottom line, and now there's probably several datacenter racks worth of drives dedicated to storing and replicating trash.

> Of course, when they first wrote this, I imagine keeping trash indefinitely had a nearly nonexistent impact on the bottom line, and now there's probably several datacenter racks worth of drives dedicated to storing and replicating trash.

Why is why they don't just let everyone upload HD videos to Youtube.

Oh wait

Precisely this. From the email I received from Google

> ..Google Drive is making a change so that its trash behaves more consistently with the rest of Google applications (such as Gmail) with regards to automatic deletion.

I agree with this policy in principle, but a ton of non-technical people in my office know that the recycle bin in Windows is never automatically emptied and rely on that fact (scary!). The 'expectation' can vary based on your experience IMO.

For all the hate Google gets this seems pretty reasonable. In fact, I thought they already did this. AFAIK, most email services do the same.

Gmail trash deletes. It's Drive trash that doesn't delete.

You mean it didn't up to now? I've always assumed that when I delete something it's gone.

This post was the impetus for my clearing out my trash and gaining something like 2GB back.

Speaking of Google drive I have a really annoying bug on the mobile app where it tries to synchronize offline files all the time. I go to the Offline tab and I have 0 files...

This bug has been around forever and of course it's a likely wontfix for Google.

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/209777/drive-sen...

Oh goddammit, I knew I wasn't doing something stupid.

Good. I had a "terabyte for life" as an ex-Googler, and Google has recently withdrawn that, so it started asking me to upgrade to their paid offering. I was like, wtf, I don't store all that much data there, how come it's showing 900+GB is in use. Turns out the trash was never deleted, and once I deleted it usage came down to less than 20GB.

Seems like this could backfire badly on their upgrade revenues TBH, for this reason.

This is a feature, good!

I was surprised last year, when my Drive was running out of space, to discover everything I'd ever deleted was still there and counting against my quota, even from years before. I mean, it was easy enough to empty the trash and fix it, but still -- I'd just assumed things got deleted after something reasonable like a month. A month feels "UX standard" to me.

A few months ago, I moved all my old photos from Drive to a local media server. I had to manually call an API endpoint [1] to remove several hundred thousand files from trash—it took 30 hrs to finish its batch job.

[1] https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v2/reference/files/e...

I wonder if this wasn't done previously so that when a file is shared, if it is trashed, the person it was shared with still has access to it?

I believe this policy was first implemented on shared files: "Files in shared drives trash are already automatically deleted after 30 days."

Google probably made a lot of money with this low-hanging fruit. Think about all that data they'll be able to purge.

I would have almost thought they would make more money keeping the trash around to analyze with newer and newer algorithms to build a better psychological profile on people.

But they probably also lose a lot of money from all the people who now won't need to upgrade to a paid storage plan.

Considering data stored for a long time and very rarely accessed is effectively free in a modern datacenter (since disks are all IO limited not capacity limited in cloud deployments), I reckon they're losing money with this change.

There's a good chance they're doing it because their lawyers have told them to - clicking the "send to trash" button could be considered a GDPR deletion request, and if Google leaves that document in the trash forever, they could be found in breach of GDPR rules.

The killed by google site should now include every item put into the google drive trash.

This is the last straw for me. I use the Trash feature to hold my most valuable files. If it's safely stored in the trash, I can't accidentally delete it, right?

Looking for recommendations for non-Google trashcans that provide strong guarantees of durability...

Have you considered a manual workaround? Print the docs and put them in a trash can at home or work. This gives you offline access, even without power.

The whole point of cloud storage is so I can access the same trashcan from work, from home, or when I'm on the go.

Are you seriously suggesting that when I'm at the coffee shop, I use their trashcan for this purpose?

I miss “Don’t Be Evil.”

Who said it had to be the same trashcan? You should pay for a service that syncs the contents of the trashcan, so you can reach into the nearest one to have all your files ready for you.

I'm been pre-MVP:ing a portable trashcan-like device you can carry on your back, in your hand or even slug across your upper body for just this usecase. Currently I'm seeking investment in a pre-seed round to recruit the UX-specialists, digital marketers and growth hackers to set up the sign-up MVP website to get this into a seed round.

The product is considered to be a sort of cloth receptacle with 1-3 handles or "straps" as we've com to call them, that can be used with almost any human protrusion, but the final product might change. We are also thinking about a zero-strap version that we just call "the unStrap".

Of course it will be cloud-native, k8s-native and almost virtually-sustainable. I have my C-CTO working on the multi-native strategy right now.

I think you are missing some opportunity for ML to identify the ideal strap count for each individual user.

We are running a AI/ML/HAL/Watson stack on Oracle Clouds to empower our evangelists and enthusiasts to make that choice for themselves before they know they have made it.

Pre-decision-decision is one of 3 to 15 things we have have identified that we will consider caring strongly about in the near future.

Thank you for your feedback, and would you mind filling in a short customer service form here: http://oracle.dev-enterprise.tech.ai/customer/"backpack"-sta... ((copy) copy 2).pdf?

It really helps us to know something (I think somebody said it was NPS or CRO or something called "W/E")

Relevant Dilbert: https://dilbert.com/strip/2003-11-13

EDIT: deleted due to responding to the wrong comment

I meant you can’t delete it anymore because I responded to it, but why not just actually delete the comment?

I forgot that that was a think I could do; sorry about that!

I think this should be a lesson to developers, set a reasonable retention period for users from day one. Maybe on the back end make it longer so you can avoid some catastrophes, but once you give a user something it is very hard to take it away. I bet Google makes a lot of people very unhappy with this change.

I wonder if this will hurt their bottom line (does trash count against your quota?)

Trash items do count against your quota.

Even though trash counts towards a user's quota... users are, by definition, using less than their quota. And the percentage of users paying for increased Drive storage is likely a small percentage of overall users.

So deleting trashed items will mean Google is storing a lot less data, and probably not impacting people's storage purchase decisions much/at all. I expect it'd be a net benefit for their bottom line.

I imagine that anyone who hits their quota and wants to add more would start making room by deleting their trash. I can't imagine there are many instances of people increasing their quota just so they can keep stuff in their trash around, and if there are, these people will probably just move the stuff out of the trash so they can keep it after this change.

More likely, Google will be deleting vast quantities of data and saving money due to the reduced amount of storage they're using.

Yes, as of today, trash was counted against the storage limit.

Just like how Gmail is supposed to automatically deletes trash items after 30 days? /s because it doesn't, at least on my Gmail account.

deleted for the user, maybe. I doubt google delete data at all.

btw: it took me a lot of time to delete my trash once I started cleaning up an almost full gmail account: a bit like when you want to delete your old facebook posts.

Ignoring the technical cost, keeing Trash files indefinitely (or for unexpectedly long periods of time) has to be at least a bit of a privacy kerfluffle risk for Google, right? People freak out when they do a GDPR data request and find just how large and long a memory Google has of their searches and locations. They likely would be even less happy finding out Google has held on to files that were long ago deleted for important and/or personal reasons.

Even without GDPR, I downloaded my location data from Google Takeout, it was whopping 1.7GB of pure json. Same data was few kbs in 2012or 2014 when takeout was new.

umm, good?

If a Google exec decides a new Google service is trash...

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