Google advertises their Google One product and Google Drive product for use as syncing to their servers to “back up” your files. Their software incorrectly indicates some files are synced when they are not. There is no way to force the sync on such files. And there’s no way to know they aren’t actually synced unless you manually check all of your files through their web interface daily, which is time consuming and unreasonable.

Additionally, files that were previously uploaded to their cloud service (One or Drive or whatever they choose to call their overpriced storage on any given month) are known to vanish. This is a known, documented problem that Google has been “addressing” for countless customers and has been covered by several media outlets for months. Despite the new media attention, this is an old problem that has not been fixed for well over a year.

This is not user error as you would suggest. This is a “Google lying to their customers” problem. I know how to use Google Drive and their other products as I was an early adopter and was paying for one of their most expensive tiers for my business.

The correct solution to the problem was to move to a more honest service like Sync.com. I have had no such problems since moving. I recommend others get the fuck away from Google as soon as they can. Fuck Google. Their company policy is to just be dishonest, and that’s reflected in their dishonest tech support (but that’s a new rant for another time).

TLDR: It’s not user error. Google is famously bad at syncing to cloud storage and they are liars about it.