[300bps]

A lot of people have Google horror stories like this.

I’ve had a gmail account since early beta. I upgraded to their $10 per month for 1 tb storage (which they recently increased to 2 tb). I recently got a better deal from Microsoft so want to switch. So over a week ago I deleted my entire Google Drive. Except it put everything into the Google Drive “trash” that still counts against me. I immediately emptied the trash except that literally did nothing that I could tell.

Then, about 100 GB per day has been freeing up from the trash for the last week and a half. I can’t cancel the extra storage until this is complete or I’ll stop receiving email on my gmail account. At the snail’s pace that it’s freeing up storage on my Google Drive from the trash they’ll be charging me another month. It’s ridiculous. And as a paying customer there’s no practical way to contact them.

[magicalist]

> And as a paying customer there’s no practical way to contact them.

Support is one of the things you get if you pay for storage, though?

[300bps]

Support is one of the things you get if you pay for storage, though?

Yes, and it's completely useless. Their user interface is such an anti-pattern that it has to be by design. All I want to do is delete everything in Google Drive and delete everything in Google Photos. For Google Photos, the fastest way to do this is to zoom out ridiculously, hold the shift key down, click the first photo to delete, then the last photo you can see on the screen and then release the shift key, click delete and repeat like 200 times for the number of photos I had on there. Oh and don't scroll out TOO much or your browser will just crash. Seriously, this is their answer to deleting photos.

And Google Drive is no better. 1.2 TB of files from my drive and cleared out the trash at least 75 times but a week and a half later I still have over 100 GB in phantom files. And suddenly all these additional images showed up when I click on Storage in drive.google.com and you guessed it - I have to delete them one page at a time. It's like they're doing anything to make sure you can't get your account under 15 GB so you can stop paying them money. And their support just gives generic advice like what I've typed here.

I've switched entirely to the new Microsoft Edge for browsing, OneDrive for storage and the only thing I have left is an ancient gmail account that I'll likely be switching over to Fastmail.

[tornato7]

One time I had a friend send me a few thousand photos on Google Drive. I tried to download those. Oh boy. Do too many at a time and it'll crash, otherwise it's select a few dozen, wait 5min for Google to zip them, then download and repeat.

I finally solved my problem by interfacing directly with their API and writing a Python script to recursively download larger folders. It's sad that I was forced to do that, but it worked.