Google has decided to now change the way Google Drive manages trashed files and documents. In case you didn’t know unless you were to manually empty the trash collected in the service’s bin folder, your files are never actually deleted from Google Drive.
The upside of this is that it makes it easier to get back documents you might have removed by accident or have had a change of heart, but we imagine that this might annoy some users as well, who’d rather prefer keeping their cloud storage clean.
Now, however, Google announced it will change the way Drive handles the files sent to trash starting on October 13th. The change consists in the trash documents being automatically deleted after 30 days.
This change means that Google Drive’s trash system will work the same way as other products launched by Google, such as Gmail, for a more consistent mechanism across all of Google’s apps.
The New Function Deletes Trashed Items After 30 Days
As mentioned above, previously, Google Drive would keep the documents in the trash for an indefinite period, unless you manually emptied the folder to actually delete them for real. This made the trash folder less of a ‘trash’ and more of a way to simply hide the files you didn’t want to see.
Administrators for G Suite will also have the possibility to restore files that are deleted from the trash for up to 25 days for active users, so if you lost an important document by accident, there’s still a chance to get it back.
While the automatic removal of the trash content might be irking to some users, there may be actual benefits to it as well, since Google actually counts trashed items that aren’t deleted toward your Drive storage ration.
To make sure every user is aware of the new function, Google will also add a banner notification to Google Drive as well as the particular Google Docs and Google Forms apps.
