TL;DR: A bug with Google Drive sync ended up deleting hundreds of my local files.
About a week ago, I was trying to move some game screencaps to a folder where I put pictures of my characters from MMOs and other games (outfits/gear, character creator sliders, etc.), and I was shocked to see that the folder was completely empty. I hadn't really looked at that folder in a while so I had no idea since when it had been that way, but I thought it must have been at least over a month, because the deleted files weren't in Google Drive's online Trash folder that automatically empties every 30 days, either.
At first I thought I had just massively screwed up somehow, and accidentally deleted the contents of the folder without noticing at some point. I gave up on trying to find/recover my files and sadly went to bed after putting the new screencaps in the folder. However, when I checked the folder again the next day, I realized that the new screencaps from the day before were ALSO gone. To make a long story short, after a bunch of experimentation, I realized that the issue was with Google Drive's file backup and sync.
I'm still not sure why, but for some reason, something had gone wrong with that one specific folder, such that every time Google Drive attempted to sync the contents of it, something would go wrong. And once something went wrong, the files would get automatically deleted on Google Drive's end. But the worst part is that after the files got deleted on Google Drive's end, for some ungodly reason, that change would also sync back and delete my LOCAL files as well. This continued to happen even after renaming and moving the folder.
I recorded a clip of what this looks like in practice. Anything put in that folder would get silently deleted once the file sync "completes". It isn't present in my Windows Recycle Bin, but it IS present in the online Google Drive Trash Folder. The only clue is a pop-up notification from Google Drive that disappears after a few seconds, saying that there was an issue with the file sync. I often have Do Not Disturb enabled on my PC so that I don't get pop-up notifications while I'm playing games or whatever, so I probably missed the notification the first time that this occurred, and my files got permanently deleted from the online Trash after a month. It also seems that there was some kind of naming/location conflict or something, because those notifications would reference the folder's old name from before I moved and renamed it for testing.
I contacted Google One Support and they were about as helpful as you might expect, such asking me approximately when the files had been deleted, as if I could tell them exactly when their service had started silently nuking my files in the background. They offered to try a data recovery, but in the end the files were not recovered, probably because it's been too long since they got deleted. I still don't know what the cause was. Maybe it's because I did some folder restructuring and renaming a few months ago, and those changes did not properly sync up with Drive. Regardless, I think it's absolutely ridiculous that a backup and sync service can end up deleting your local files if something goes wrong with the syncing process.
As a result, I have lost hundreds of pictures, and years' worth of memories across various games. I guess I should just consider myself lucky that it wasn't anything truly essential that got deleted, but suffice it to say that I no longer trust Google Drive with any of my files, and I will be unsubscribing from the service immediately. I definitely do not recommend the service to anyone who doesn't want to worry about their backup service arbitrarily deleting their local files.
On that note, does anyone have any recommendations for a different, more reliable cloud storage/backup service that WON'T nuke my files? I was thinking of looking at OneDrive. I do also have periodic FreeFileSync local backups on an external hard drive, but that backup had long since been overwritten with the version where my files had been deleted. I will probably set up another FreeFileSync job so that I have a monthly backup as an additional safety measure in addition to the mirroring I had been doing every few days.
