září 15, 2020
Google Drive trash items will be automatically deleted after 30 days starting on October 13, 2020
What’s changing
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.
Any files already in a user’s trash on October 13, 2020 will remain there for 30 days. After the 30-day period, files that have been in the trash for longer than 30 days will begin to be automatically deleted.
Who’s impacted
End users
Why it’s important
This change matches the policies of other G Suite products and services, such as Gmail. This will help ensure behavior is consistent and predictable for users across G Suite products, and will help make sure that items users trash are actually deleted as expected.
Additional details
Policy change notes
- Admins can still restore items deleted from a user’s trash for up to 25 days for active users.
- Retention policies set by admins in Google Vault are not affected by this change, unless they become obsolete as they are now redundant. Learn more about retention rules for Drive.
- These changes affect items that are trashed from any device and any platform.
- Files deleted via Drive File Stream will be purged from the system trash after 30 days. There is no impact to Backup and Sync behavior.
- Files in shared drives trash are already automatically deleted after 30 days.
- Items in trash will still continue to consume quota.
In-app notification for users
As this policy takes effect, we will show a banner to users with details of the change. The policy change will take effect regardless of whether a user sees or acknowledges the banner. We will be showing in-app notifications in Drive starting today and in our Editors products (e.g., Google Docs and Google Forms) starting September 29.
Getting started
- Admins: There is no end user setting for this feature. Visit our Help Center to see how admins can restore a user’s Drive data.
- End users: There is no end user setting for this feature. Visit the Help Center to learn more about how to delete and restore files in Google Drive.
Rollout pace
- Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility)] starting on October 13, 2020
Availability
- Applicable to all G Suite customers