On the first day of my new job at The Data School NY, I dutifully installed Google Drive to keep my files backed up. The next day, I was graced with a fatal technical disaster. Despite my company-provided laptop being brand new and having next to zero files backed up, I was met with this storage interface:
It was scary, and prevented me from properly completing a Tableau challenge in my first week. Fortunately I uncovered a solution on my own. This blog post is essentially an IT fix for anyone dealing with a similar issue.
What's Going On?
As you can see, my google drive had nearly nothing in it. Roughly 3 GB total, so it's not like any files could have been taking up my hard drive space.
Still, my Drive settings were set to "Stream files." It couldn't have been the case that any files anywhere were automatically backing up to my hard drive.
As one final check, I went through the right click menu of every single file and folder. Each one indicated it was only available online - none were saved as "available offline."
So... what happened? Honestly, I don't know. At first I attempted to uninstall and reinstall Drive, but that actually didn't change anything. I did find out how to resolve the issue by "unplugging it and plugging it back in" in a different way.
The Solution:
Via the Google Drive icon on the right side of the Windows toolbar, navigate to the settings wheel, then Preferences, click the settings wheel again, and finally you'll have to select "Disconnect account."
After doing this I uninstalled Google Drive for good measure, but I'm not certain if this is 100% necessary. Either way, at this point it was apparent that my hard drive was back to normal.
And sure enough, after reinstalling Drive the issue has not cropped back up.
