Revert or Restore rclone sync to Google Drive G Suite

Help and Support
1

What is the problem you are having with rclone?

We have launched the following command on a folder with more than 200,000 files and almost 80 GB:

rclone sync -P . drivename:/ --ignore-existing

The problem is that it has replaced files and deleted folders that we cannot now recover through the Google Drive admin console because no such changes appear registered from its interface. We have tried to perform a restore (admin console) without success either. We also do not see any previous files from the Manage Previous Versions of any files that have been replaced.

  • Is there an option to revert this?
  • Is there any application, even a third party application to recover these files?
  • These files we want to rescue are Excel and Word documents that have been opened with Microsoft Office through the Windows 10 Google Drive app that mounts a drive (G:/). Do you know if there is any way to recover them locally from the computer where it was opened?

Any help is welcome in order to recover these files.

Run the command 'rclone version' and share the full output of the command.

rclone v1.59.0

  • os/version: ubuntu 20.04 (64 bit)
  • os/kernel: 5.14.0-1045-oem (x86_64)
  • os/type: linux
  • os/arch: amd64
  • go/version: go1.18.3
  • go/linking: static
  • go/tags: none

Which cloud storage system are you using? (eg Google Drive)

Google Drive G Suite

2

When rclone deletes things it should put them in the trash unless you used --drive-use-trash=false which it looks like you didn't (unless you had it set in your config).

It should also be making versions of existing files too.

Can you show your config file with secrets redacted?

Rclone can show what is in the trash with

rclone ls --drive-trashed-only drivename:

Does that show any files you want to keep?

3

I get a lot of files but I think so.

How could I do a more precise search for these files and then restore them?

Thank you very much

4

Do do a more precise search probably easiest to save the output of the rclone ls command in a text file and check through it in your favourite editor

rclone ls --drive-trashed-only drivename: > trash-listing.txt

To restore files from the trash, you can do it in the web interface Google Drive: Sign-in which is very easy, or you can do it with rclone.

Let's say you wanted to restore everything from the trash you would do

rclone -i backend untrash drivename:

Or if you wanted to be more selective you'd put the file / directory on the end

rclone -i backend untrash drivename:path/to/directory

I put the -i flag on there so rclone will ask you questions about doing something before doing it.

5

Not trying to make a hindsight comment but making sure you are aware.

Before I ever do a big delete type operation, I use --dry-run to make sure it's going to do what I want and validate the expectation. I've made many mistakes over the years and pretty much everyone has deleted a bunch of stuff by mistake so I always have one step to validate before as it saves me a lot of time in the end.

6

I made it! Thank you very much for your help.

1 Like
7

Thanks for the advice, I will keep it in mind for next time.

Although in my case I am trying to migrate data from a NAS to Drive with 80+ GB folders with 200,000+ files. With one folder it took over 48 hours syncing data.

Any advice on how to do this type of migration?

Thank you very much again

8

Google sucks on creating small files as you can only do 2-3 per second via the API so there's really not much to do to get around that unfortunately.

It's not the size that's getting you, it's the number of files. You really just have to bite the bullet and let it go.

9

hi,
perhaps choose another provider with decent performance.
many choices to choose from.

10

Just be aware it will take at least 100,000 seconds which is 1.2 days - so not too long.

11

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