Unable to empty Google Drive Trash

Help and Support
1

I have a large amount of files in my Google Drive Trash and I’m unable to empty them from the web interface or Google Drive mobile app. I tried running the cleanup command, but nothing seems to happen and there are still files in my trash on the website.

I ran the following command:
rclone cleanup -v googleapps:

with the following result after 1 second.
INFO : Google drive root '': Modify window is 1ms

I am on rclone 1.40. Any thoughts as to why this is failing to empty my trash?

Thanks for the help!

2

I’ve seen this a few times myself, no error and files still in the bin. Running the command a few times after eachother usually clears it.

3

I tried it on a different google account with about 20 files in the trash, and it did delete them after running the command a couple times.

I set up a cronjob to run the command every minute… let’s see what happens over night!

4

The cronjob is still running every minute. However, I have noticed that my drive storage usage is continually decreasing, which shows signs of it working. I must have had hundreds of thousands of files in there.

I use Arq backup to my google drive and it chunks up all the files, which creates a large amount of files. I recently deleted all of those files and moved Arq to using the app data folder.

5

Here’s a different approach that works by progressively deleting deleting files from the root of the trash (using the original folder hierarchy, not what you see in the Web UI’s trash folder)

rclone delete google: --drive-trashed-only --drive-use-trash=false --verbose=2

You can confirm by looking at the Activity Log in the Web UI; it should show “You permanently deleted X items” in the activity log. It looks like this is actually from emptying the trash via the Web UI, see below

6

The Web UI does seem to eventually empty the trash, but it takes a long time; it’s likely bound by similar rate limiting quotas.

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