Google Drive and Team Drive Backup and Recovery

HOW CAN DRIVE AND TEAM DRIVE FILES BE LOST?

Google Drive and Team Drive files can be due to human error, sync errors, accidental deletions, malicious acts, and malware, or due to accidental or malicious account deletion.

• Human error and accidental deletions.
  Emptying the Drive Trash to “clean things up,” incorrectly configuring a Drive folder or file migration from one account to another, accidentally deleting a file or folder and finding it’s gone forever due to storage limitations…losing a Drive file through human error is not uncommon. These can be compounded by the collaborative nature of Drive. A file creator or collaborator may think a file’s no longer needed and delete it. And while Team Drives reduces the chance for an owner deletion, since the Team owns the file, it is still possible for a file to be deleted in error. While Google “soft delete” (Trash) then “hard delete” (Trash emptied or 30 days + 25 days) helps undo human error on Drive loss, it doesn’t eliminate human error. Admins can have a bad day, and delete accounts and files in error as well.
• Sync errors.
  A Drive folder or file can be lost due to sync errors. For example, a failed sync can result in orphaned files, and other files that may not be accessible. See this Support forum discussion. “…the orphaned files are not from a user deleting their shared folder. According to the google tech on the phone it can be caused by connectivity issues between google drive cloud and the local machine, where google drive cloud errors out and orphans the files. …the files that are not orphaned in the same folder location in the Drive and locally…remain in the cloud but won’t download locally.”
• Malicious acts.
  Insider attacks from a user, such as moving all the Drive folders they own to the Trash, then emptying the Trash, can make it impossible to recover files and folders. Insider attacks from a rogue admin can do even more damage. If they delete Team Drive folders and accounts, Google can’t tell that the permitted act is malicious, and business-critical files can be wiped out at compute speed.
• Malware.
  Malware can potentially make Drive and Team Drive files inaccessible unless you pay the ransom. Just because your anti-virus applications look like they’ve successfully blocked a virus, viruses evolve and pose new risks. “Just like it happens in many other companies, someone clicked on a malicious link in an email. Normally you would think it would not affect your cloud files, but our legal team’s repository was syncing up to Google Drive. The Drive sync tool did its job and right away started uploading the malware-encrypted files,” said Spanning customer Jesse Nowlin, IT Director at Westland Real Estate Group. These sorts of issues may not only affect your domain, but can quickly spread to customer and vendor domains.