How do I recover my Google Drive photos?
Q
Having read Issue 671’s excellent ‘Stop Google deleting your files’ Cover Feature (get it from www. snipca.com/49540), I went to my Google Drive storage page to erase some old files. To my pleasant surprise, I found some old photos from 2017 that I thought I’d lost after one of my previous phones was stolen when I was mugged a few years ago. I’d like to recover these images, but when I attempt to find them on my Google Drive desktop program, they are not there – even though they appear in my Google Drive storage. Could you suggest a way to recover them, please?
Mike Johnston-price
A
Google Drive isn’t the most userfriendly online-storage system, with options to either mirror or stream files – and then there are multiple sub-options depending on which of those two you choose.
Streaming is the default option, and it means files only ‘exist’ online. When you want to access one, it is ‘streamed’ to your PC by the desktop version of Google Drive. In this mode, files or folders that you want to make permanently available offline – either for instant access or for when you’re away from an internet connection – must be marked as such. To do this, you need to first right-click the files/folder, then hover over ‘Offline access’ before clicking to tick ‘Available offline’ (see screenshot).
The ‘Mirror files’ option, which can be set in Google Drive by first clicking its Settings cog followed by Preferences and then Google Drive, does what you might guess – which is to exactly mirror the contents of your online Google Drive with your desktop version. So, the files ‘exist’ in both places, and any changes, additions or deletions are immediately mirrored on both.
Either way, however, you should be able to ‘see’ all files in your Google Drive desktop program, so we’re not sure why you can see your old photos only online – though this can sometimes result from shared folders becoming ‘orphaned’ by their original owner deleting the folder.
Restarting Google Drive desktop will force it to re-sync. If that doesn’t help, you can just download the files directly from the web version of Google Drive. Log in as normal, then right-click the photo folder or photos before choosing Download. To select multiple folders or photos, hold down the Control (Ctrl) or Shift key.