Google has been hard at work this year and the number of updates they have provided to various products of theirs have been too numerous to count. Overnight they announced another update, this time to Google Drive.

Starting October 13 items within the trash of Google Drive will be automatically deleted after 30 days. Previously the items stayed in the trash indefinitely until the user deleted them themselves but now after items have been in the trash for more than 30 days will be automatically deleted.

Google have brought this new change to bring the Google Drive policies in line with those of their other products such as Gmail. Google say that it will help users as when users delete items they usually expect them to be deleted and not stay accessible — ie. items that you delete will actually be deleted.

The new policy applies to any item that is trashed from any device on any platform at any time. The advantage is that items in trash contribute to the data quota of a user so this should hopefully clear up some of that quota for users.

The new feature will be rolled out starting on October 13 with rollout possibly lasting more than 15 days. If you have anything in your trash and may want it back now is the time to check it before it is automatically deleted.

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Tom Sekulic

Since I’m paying for my Google drive, I want an option how frequently my thrash is cleared. It’s my money, my choice!

PukeyLuke

It seems reasonable on Google’s behalf.
I would imagine that their research would show that many people would bin and forget their files, not knowing that it is sitting there forever. That would be many petabytes of data storage going to waste!!