Google Drive and orphaned files
TL;DR:
Clean out your Google Drive of old, orphaned files you didn’t realize you still have – and close up a potential privacy hole.
The Story:
I am working on a longer, detailed article on how I use Google Drive, and how it has transformed how I work on live productions. In researching what might have been a potential bug, I came across another issue that definitely exists: depending on who creates and shares files and how they are deleted, sometimes those files still exist – DESPITE emptying the trash.
Orphaned files are files that exist, but technically do not appear in any directory. They appear in searches of your account, but you can’t find them just by browsing your directory structures.
I don’t know all of the scenarios that can lead to this, but it definitely can happen. I needed a solution to “how do I know if i have files that haven’t fully deleted – how much junk, if any, has accumulated in my Drive without my knowing it?” In researching this, i saw that files I had created years ago on a tour with Hiatus Kaiyote, for instance, as well as ones from Laramie Project only months ago, were all still available in my Drive, and viewable by various people I shared them with, even though they were past their useful life and had been deleted. (Ostensibly, it was also cruft building up on their own Google Drives as well, if only under the “Shared with me” section.”
I’ll cover more about Google Drive in the next article; but, for now, if you are a current user, you’ll want to do the following.
The Esoteric Bit:
Files I had shared and then deleted were still sometimes showing up if I did a search for the file name. I could then delete the file again/completely. That’s great – if you know the file name and know to look for it! Clicking on “Details” for the orphaned file confirmed that it didn’t live in a directory – not even in the root (top) level.
However, you can do a search for ALL such files. Go to https://drive.google.com and enter the following in the search field:
is:unorganized owner:me
This will give you a list of all orphaned files in your Drive. From here, you can delete the files, or move them into a Google Drive folder (and they’d no longer be orphaned). From my findings, it seems to work best if you remove the sharing privileges first and then delete the files.
In my case, I was able to clear up 9 GB worth of trash!! (One of my other accounts, on the other hand, had no orphaned files. So your results may vary.)
NOTE: Of course, in this day and age, it would be courtesy to make sure that people have made copies of and files they want and that anything you throw out really and truly is “trash”. Some people share files indefinitely, and expect you to do the same. The point of this article is to make sure that all of the things you THOUGHT you deleted are actually gone.
Cheers!
-brian
