Google drive has a hidden bug. I see in on every account, but Google support calls it a feature, while contradicting the official documentation.
What is the problem? It never deletes anything!
When you edit or overwrite a (not G-Suite) file, it is supposed to keep the old revision of this file for 30 days before purging it. This lets you revert back to the old revision. Most people don't even knows these automatic backups are there, but they do count against your usage quota!
Fine. Dandy. But there's a bug. You see there's also a feature to go make a revision as "Keep Forever", if you want. The bug is, that option is automatically set! So while the documentation tells you that old revisions will be deleted after 30 days, freeing up your disk quota, they actually are never deleted!
This does not happen with all files or all ways files are updated. I haven't figured out the pattern. I can tell you two examples:
- Upload a text file via https://drive.google.com.
- Edit the file locally, and upload it again.
- Use Google Backup and Sync
- Include an MP3 file in your local Google Drive folder. (Let it sync up.)
- Edit that MP3 (change tags). (Let it sync.)
In both cases, you will find two revisions - the current one and the older one with the Keep Forever checkmark hidden within.
I discovered this when Google Backup and Sync told me that my data was using 59 GB, but drive.google.com said I was using 108 GB.
After going around in circles with Google support, I found the Google Drive API and wrote this script.
To use:
- Clone this repository to your computer.
- Visit https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/quickstart/nodejs
- Click the blue ENABLE THE DRIVE API button
- In the popup, click on DOWNLOAD CLIENT CONFIGURATION and save the file into the directory with this code.
- Go into the new directory on the command-line with Node.js v8 or later available.
- On the command line, enter:
npm installnpm start
Follow the directions to authorize the application to access your
Google account - this will be saved to the token.json file and
remain valid for some times, so that you don't have to authorize
again if you run again soon.
This script takes a very long time to run. It has to issue a request to Google for every single file in your G-Drive, to check the revisions on it, and another for to clear each Keep Forever flags it finds. Plan to let it run over night - maybe longer.
Each day that you run this script, you will need to forec re-authentication
by deleting the token.json file. If you receive an unauthorized_client error,
that means you need to delete token.json. Just delete it and run again.
By the time I had written this script, my usage had grown to 126 GB. After running it, usage dropped to 71 GB. (Active file space was around 60 GB, but some had been modified within 30 days and thus had revisions not yet purged.)
Until Google fixes this behavior, you will need to re-run on occation to find new revisions and clear the flag on them.
This script works for me, but I make no guarantees what so ever that it will work for you. Some of your data will be deleted. That is the purpose of this script. It should only be the non-current historical revisions of files that were replaced over 30 days ago. The source code is here, and you run it yourself. Use at your own risk.
Using Node.js is an unreasonable requirement for most people. I wrote this script to solve my own account, and share it as open source for anyone else to use. If you can make it more user friendly, please do. Let me know about it and I'll link to your project.
CC0 - No copyright reserved