James Wallace Harris 2/28/22
I’ve been using Google drive for years and years and always felt safe doing so. Over the past two years, I’ve had two spreadsheet files get corrupted. In both cases, I was printing them when part of the data was lost. It appeared that data that wasn’t in the print area was just removed.
In both cases, I tried to use the file version utility to get back to an early stage, and in both cases, it failed. I figured, what the heck, just don’t try to print from Google sheets, but download a copy and import it into Excel to print.
I told a friend about this, and he said he’s never had trouble with files on Google Drive. I figured my two incidents were just weird printing flukes. Then today that friend texted me and said Google Drive lost two of his files – just gone. Both were notes about a programming project that he spent weeks collecting. Ouch. Now I’m worried.
Google doesn’t offer tech support, at least that I can see for free personal accounts. There is a fair amount of documentation offering help. Basically, it suggests using the version control feature for corrupted files, and the undelete feature of the Trash. Even though I worked on my last spreadsheet for a couple hours, there were only two versions – a blank 11:35am version, and a corrupted 1:31pm version. I tried all kinds of things. I downloaded a .csv version to see if the data was hidden. I tried cutting and pasting to a new worksheet. I ended up importing the .csv file into Excel and retyping the deleted data.
Now, you might ask if I have Excel, why am I using Google Sheets? I just like Sheets, and I assumed by putting something in my Google Drive it would be safe. That Google would back things up, and keep plenty of versions.
And it’s also true, I’ve had corrupted files over the decades using Microsoft Office. Nothing is perfect. I used Google Drive because sometimes I like to share files, but mostly because it’s convenient, and I assumed such a tech giant would always protect my files better than I could.
Now, I’m wondering if corrupt or lost files on Google Drive are very common. Has it happened to you?
If I can’t trust Google Drive I’ll have to stop using it for creating files. I’ll do my work offline and then upload anything I need to share. In retrospect, I should have been saving my Google Drive files to a local drive before printing or doing any major reformatting or global calculations. I should have known better since I was in tech support for decades and I now remember all the times people came to me with corrupted files or lost files that happened after printing.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 