I started yesterday talking about the latest part of the Google drive saga, with the discovery of the ‘Desktop’ folder, which was inside the ‘My computer’ folder, which was inside the ‘Computers’ folder. There were two other folders in the ‘My computer’ folder, one called ‘Documents’ and one called ‘Pictures’. I opened ‘Documents’ and it contained one other folder, called ‘Bridport’, which rang a vague bell, but when I opened it, it was empty. I tried drilling down through some of the folders in ‘Desktop’ too, and found that they were also empty.
It was very puzzling, but I went back to the list of files in descending order by size. At the top were some music files, which I didn’t want to delete because I regularly access them from my phone, but I had a go at deleting some of the photo files again. I started getting warning messages telling me that the files would be deleted ‘…from all devices…’ which spooked me a bit. Did this mean they would be deleted from my hard drive ‘Desktop’ as well? I decided to leave that until I could confirm that they were still there, and went back to copying all the photos from my phone to my computer and then deleting them from Google photos, and the ones from the latest phone backup from my phone into the ‘USB devices and SD cards folder’. This got the storage down to about 11GB again, and I left it at that.
The next day when I restarted the computer, the usual messages about my cloud space being 99% full came up. I opened Google Drive and went to the Desktop folder. Inside it was a complete list of the folders on my computer desktop, including the ‘Backup photos’ folder which I had specifically created to save the photos I’ve been downloading and deleting from Google Drive to save space. I opened it, and it contained files which I had created only the day before.
At this point, I need to explain how I organise the files on my computer. My virtual desktop is pretty similar to the state of my physical desktop (and you’ve seen photos of that). Although I am quite organised in having folders for important stuff: individual projects, my blog, poems, accounts, novel, etc etc, I create them on the Desktop and shove the lower folders and various files inside them – although I also have a tendency to save files to the desktop ‘temporarily’, so there are always quite a few odd documents or photos lying around which I don’t sort out, so that the whole thing becomes a bit of a mess, and I rely heavily on the ‘recently accessed files’.
And it seemed as if not just my phone, but all the files from my desktop (in other words, all the files I had put – and was continuing to put – on my terabyte of hard drive) were being automatically backed up to the 15gb of cloud space… tbc