Can I use rclone to wipe the "storage" section of my Google Drive?

I have a ton of small files in the "storage" section of my Google Drive which I'd like to delete without having to go page-by-page on the web interface. I've connected to my GDrive with rclone, but all it shows are the files that appear in the "My Drive" section on the web interface. How do I get rclone to access "storage"?

What does rclone about yourgoogledrive: show? That will tell you where the files are stored.

you can also run rclone lsd on your remote to get a list of directories.
for example,

rclone lsd gdrive:
          -1 2020-02-22 16:19:13        -1 zork

and then
rclone delete gdrive:zork

D:\rclone>rclone about gdrive:
Total: 5 TiB
Used: 222.374 TiB
Free: off
Trashed: 37.040 TiB
Other: 36.146 MiB

If I do:
D:\rclone>rclone ls gdrive:
1555552 ripsave - Explosive detection canine TTirado got an awesome reward after his final bag search before retirement!.mp4
696774 Getting started

That's all that's listed.

lsd returns nothing, as I have no folders in my drive.

Is all your data in the trash?

You can see this with

rclone ls gdrive,trashed_only:

You can delete everything in the trash with

rclone delete -v gdrive,trashed_only:

As googles trash emptying doesn't seem to work very well.

D:\rclone>rclone ls gdrive,trashed_only:
2023/05/19 10:51:59 NOTICE: Dangling shortcut "We Love s01e02 Are You Being Served HDTV 540p x264-CF.mkv" detected
1555552 ripsave - Explosive detection canine TTirado got an awesome reward after his final bag search before retirement!.mp4
696774 Getting started
96496214 Videos/Unicorn Doggie.mp4
69203680 Shared/20200402_211542.mp4
143056 Shared/Logitech G - Order confirmation for order #3261682239.pdf
0 temp/We Love s01e02 Are You Being Served HDTV 540p x264-CF.mkv

Those are all files that used to be in my drive, but I removed. Gdrive apparently thinks I have 37 TB in the trash, but another 220 TB... somewhere.

You can sort the storage tab by size descending which will show you the big files at least.

Note that there is app storage also which isn't visible in the google drive interface. And there is the computers tab which shows drive syncing I think.

Unfortunately, the largest files are around 100 MB. I think I'm just going to cancel my subscription, it's no use to me without "unlimited" storage and it'll take too much time and effort to try to figure this out.

People have reported before that after deleting lots of files drive gets confused about the free/used state but it sorts itself out eventually.

I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually worked itself out, but I really have no use for the service any more, it's easier just to cancel. Thanks for your help.

1 Like

I have noticed this. Do you think it is an issue with the Google Drive API or is it rclone related?

You can click the button on the website or use rclone cleanup - emptying the trash seems to take an indeterminate amount of times sometimes. Using rclone delete -v gdrive,trashed_only: is often faster and more reliable!

Even clicking the button can take an indeterminate amount of time. It must be the API I guess.

Maybe it is in Google Photos?

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.