Google Drive will start automatically deleting Trash files after 30 days
Beginning October 13th, Drive will no longer store your digital garbage indefinitely.
Beginning on October 13th, Google Drive is changing its Trash policies. After 30 days, files that you’ve trashed will be automatically deleted. Until now, those files have been stored indefinitely, unless you manually and permanently deleted them from Trash. There’s a good chance you’ll only be impacted by this change if you were using this odd policy to hoard files.
As The Verge notes, other Google products, like Gmail, already delete trashed files after 30 days. So this update will bring some consistency across Google’s products.
To help everyone ease into this transition, Google Drive will display a banner with details of the change and will show in-app notifications in Drive, Docs and Forms. Admins will still be able to restore files deleted from a user’s trash for up to 25 days, and the changes don’t impact policies set by Google Vault admins.
