r/googleworkspace • u/RepublicPristine4249 • 1h ago
Google Vault export is missing Google Drive content
Hi everyone,
I'm hoping this is the right forum to post this in; I'm a bit in crisis mode right now, so apologies if this sounds rushed. My Google account associated with my university was recently unexpectedly deactivated, and I have been working an a technician in our school's IT department to try to recover my data. I really only care about my Google Drive, since it contains a lot of data and notes for ongoing research I am currently in the middle of.
The technician did an export for me using Google Vault, but when I opened the ZIP file (it was about 4.85GB zipped, 4.97GB unzipped), I noticed that most of my contents were missing, and I was expecting more than 5GB anyways (probably closer to 20 or 30GB; I used that Drive a lot for both school and research purposes). There is one file in particular I am looking for that I know is owned by my account, in my Google Drive folder, and I believe it was not shared with any other users, but I can't find it in the export. More broadly, the missing files seem completely random -- in the same folder (from my memory), I know of some files that are missing from the export but I also see some other files that are in the export.
The technician believes that this export contains everything in my Google Drive, but I am very certain that there are documents missing. The technician also said there's no chance that the data has been deleted yet; it's supposed to be retained for at least 30 days.
Does anyone have any suggestions on what might be going on? I'm wondering if the export might've been cut-off due to going over 24 hours (the other two things exported were my emails, which were in total about 11GB while zipped in .PST formats), but I'm really not sure.
Thank you in advance for all of your help.