Are your Google Drive files missing on your Chromebook? You’re not alone
A strange thing happened to me last night: As I was getting some work done on my Chromebook Pixel, I noticed that all of my Google Drive files were missing in my Chromebook’s built-in file manager. Normally, Google Drive appears in the Files app as if all of those files are stored locally – its tight integration with the local storage in Chrome OS is what ultimately convinced me to move all of my files to the cloud and truly embrace cloud computing.
And last night they were gone.
You can imagine the terror I initially felt, which was soon quelled when I navigated to the Google Drive web interface in the Chrome browser and confirmed that all my files were safe and sound. So why weren’t they showing up in the Files app?
I tried everything I could think of to get them back: I restarted, I ensured that Google Drive was enabled on the device, I downgraded from the beta to the stable channel, and after none of that worked, I performed a full system restore in recovery (luckily, that only takes about fifteen minutes in Chrome OS). Still nothing.
After a bit of investigation, I found a thread in the official Chromebook Community in Google Groups, with people reporting that multiple devices are affected, including the Samsung Series 5 and the HP Chromebook 14.
This morning, however, Google Drive appears once more on my Chromebook Pixel. I didn’t update or change anything since I powered down last night, which leads me to believe that this was a server-side issue. It also makes me a little more hesitant about trusting the cloud as much as I do: either Google seems to be having an increasing amount of difficulty maintaining its “over 99%” uptime, or I’m just noticing all the outages more often now.
In any case, were you (or are you) affected by this particular problem? If so, has your access been restored?
