In case you didn’t know, unless you were to manually empty the trash in Google Drive, your files are never truly deleted. The upside is that this makes it easier to retrieve documents you might have accidentally deleted or have had a change of heart, but we imagine that this might irk some users as well who prefer keeping their cloud storage neat.However, there is good news on that front because Google has announced that starting October 13, 2020, Google Drive will start emptying the trash automatically every 30 days. This means that similar to Gmail, users won’t have to do anything on their end as it will get emptied out every month, unless they were to manually do it themselves.
According to Google, “Starting October 13, 2020, we’re changing the retention policies for items in the Trash in Google Drive. With this new policy, any file that is put into a Google Drive trash will be automatically deleted after 30 days. Previously, trashed items would be retained indefinitely until the trash was emptied by the user.”
However, Google does note that for G Suite users, admins will still have the ability to restore items deleted from the trash up to 25 days after it was emptied out, so there’s still going to be a small window of opportunity for users to recover files they did not mean to delete.
Filed in . Read more about Google and Google Drive. Source: gsuiteupdates.googleblog