Most articles on this hand you fifteen fixes in no particular order and hope one lands. This one is ordered, because the order is the point: each step is cheap and eliminates an entire class of cause.
Everything here was checked against Google’s own documentation in September 2026. Where Google publishes nothing, we say so instead of guessing — and there is more of that than you would expect.
Three things changed in 2025 and 2026 that break sync
If your Drive worked until recently and then stopped, start here. These are new failure modes and almost nothing online covers them.
1. Windows now requires WebView2
From version 117.0 (10 November 2025), Drive for desktop on Windows requires the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime. It ships with Windows 11 and most Windows 10 machines — but not on debloated images, LTSC builds, or machines where an imaging script stripped it out.
The symptom is not a file error. It is a sign-in window that never appears, a blank white settings panel, or “signed out and will not sign back in.” Check under Settings → Apps for Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime, and reinstall the Evergreen Runtime if it is missing.
2. macOS switched to WebKit
Version 119.0 (5 January 2026) moved the Mac client to Apple’s WebKit framework. Same class of failure: authentication and settings windows misbehave, files are fine.
3. Google Photos backup was removed entirely
This one matters because it produces a flood of “Drive stopped syncing my photos” searches that have no bug behind them. The sunset was announced in version 126.0 (26 May 2026), and third-party reporting puts the shutdown at 10 August 2026. (Google’s release notes confirm the announcement; the exact date comes from press coverage rather than Google, so treat it as approximately right.)
Photos already backed up are unaffected. To back up folders now, use the Google Photos website — the + icon, then “Backup folders” — which only runs while the site is open, or use the Photos mobile app.
And one piece of housekeeping: Backup and Sync no longer exists. It merged into Drive for desktop in 2021 and sign-in was disabled on 1 October 2021. Any guide telling you to check Backup and Sync settings is five years stale, which is a useful signal about the rest of its advice.
The diagnostic order
Step 0 — is it everything, or one thing?
| What is broken | Where to look |
|---|---|
| One file | File-level causes — size, locks, name collisions |
| One folder | Permissions or a shared drive problem |
| Everything, on one machine | The client or the operating system |
| Everything, everywhere including drive.google.com | Your account, your quota, or Google |
Step 1 — open drive.google.com in a browser
This single test splits the problem in half, and it is the step people skip. The browser is ground truth.
- In the browser but not on your desktop — a download-side failure. Client, cache, OS or permissions.
- On your desktop but not in the browser — an upload-side failure. Quota, file size, a paused client, or the file was never actually inside the sync root.
Step 2 — check your quota
Before touching anything else. It is the most common cause and the cheapest to check: drive.google.com left rail → Storage, or one.google.com/storage.
Steps 3 to 8
- Is the client running, signed in, and not paused? Menu bar on macOS, system tray on Windows. No icon at all means it is not running.
- Read the client’s own error. Drive for desktop names its failures in the activity panel. Almost nobody looks.
- Check the Google Workspace Status Dashboard. Thirty seconds, rules out Google.
- Check disk space and antivirus interference.
- Check network, proxy and VPN.
- Only now start resetting — least destructive first.
Quota: what actually happens when you are full
Your 15 GB on a personal account is one pool shared across Drive, Gmail, Google Photos and WhatsApp backups. That is why people with almost nothing in Drive are still full — it is Gmail attachments and Photos.
Here is what Google says happens at 100 per cent, and one item on this list is the reason your whole team thinks Drive is broken:
- Your files stay safe. Nothing is deleted. You can still view and download.
- Drive stops syncing and uploading. You cannot create new Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms or Vids.
- Gmail cannot send or receive — and incoming messages bounce back to the sender.
- Photos stops backing up.
- And the one nobody mentions: “no one can edit or copy your files.” When you are over quota, your collaborators are locked out of editing documents you own. So a colleague reporting “this doc has gone read-only” can be caused by a storage problem on an entirely different person’s account.
If you stay over quota for two years, Google says it “might delete your content across Gmail, Drive, and Photos.” Note the hedge — might, not will.
Finding what is actually eating the space
one.google.com/storage/management— the central manager, and where device backups hide.- Drive web → left menu → Storage — files ranked largest first. This shows files you own, which is correct: Shared with me does not count against you.
- Gmail search operators, Google’s own suggestions:
has:attachment larger:10M,filename:.pdf larger:5M,older_than:2y has:attachment. - Trash counts. Deleting from Drive frees nothing until Trash is emptied — and the same goes for Gmail Trash and Spam.
The hard ceilings that stop uploads silently
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Maximum file size | 5 TB |
| Upload and copy per user per 24 hours | 750 GB |
| Items per account | 500 million |
| Items in a single My Drive folder | 500,000 |
| Folder nesting depth | 100 levels |
The 750 GB daily ceiling is a genuinely common invisible cause. Someone runs a bulk migration, sync halts without explanation, and no article mentions it. Note also that a file larger than 750 GB cannot be copied at all — you must download and re-upload.
On Workspace, most editions use pooled storage — one organisation-wide pool rather than per-seat allowances. But an admin can still impose per-user limits, so you can be blocked from uploading while the organisation has terabytes free.
File-level causes
| File type | Limit |
|---|---|
| Google Docs | 1.02 million characters |
| Word or text converted to Docs | 50 MB |
| Google Sheets | 10 million cells or 18,278 columns |
| PowerPoint converted to Slides | 100 MB |
| Cells during conversion | cells over 50,000 characters are removed |
| Photos | will not sync over 200 MB or 150 megapixels |
| Videos | will not sync over 10 GB |
That cell-truncation rule is a silent data-loss trap: the conversion “succeeds” and quietly drops content over 50,000 characters in a cell.
A .gdoc file is not a document
A .gdoc, .gsheet or .gslides file on your disk is a tiny JSON stub containing a URL. It is a pointer, not content. Which means:
- Its size on disk is a few hundred bytes no matter how large the document is.
- Copying it to a USB stick or emailing it transfers nothing usable.
- It needs a network connection and a browser. It will never open offline as a real file.
- If a Doc looks “missing” locally, you may be hunting for a file type that does not exist as content on disk.
Files open in another application
Windows takes exclusive locks. A file open in Excel, Word, Photoshop or an active database cannot be replaced by the sync client. The symptom is one file stuck on “syncing” forever. Close the app, or reboot to clear a stale lock left by a crashed process. On Windows you can identify the culprit in Resource Monitor → CPU → Associated Handles by searching the filename.
Two files with the same name
Drive’s cloud store permits two files with identical names in one folder. Windows and macOS filesystems do not. When the client tries to write both, one silently fails. Symptom: visible in the browser, absent on disk, no error. Fix it in the browser by renaming one.
Filename characters — what we can and cannot tell you
Google publishes no list of filename characters that break sync. We looked. Everything circulating on forums is inference.
What is defensible — and this is the operating system’s constraint, not Drive’s — is that Drive’s cloud store accepts characters Windows forbids: \ / : * ? " < > |, plus reserved device names (CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1–9, LPT1–9), trailing spaces and trailing periods. A file created on a Mac or through the web UI with a colon in its name cannot be written to an NTFS volume. That is Windows saying no, not Google.
Streaming versus mirroring, explained properly
This is the single biggest source of confusion in Drive for desktop, and getting it straight resolves three separate complaints at once.
| Streaming | Mirroring | |
|---|---|---|
| Where files live | Primarily in the cloud, made available offline when accessed | Always on your computer and in the cloud |
| Local disk use | Minimal | A full local copy |
| Offline access | Only files you specifically mark. The app must be running | Everything, always |
| My Drive | Either mode | Either mode |
| Shared drives | Streaming only | Not possible |
| Local folders and Desktop | Not possible | Mirroring only |
Three failure reports fall straight out of that table:
- “My shared drive files disappear offline.” They are supposed to. Shared drives can only be streamed — there is no configuration in which a shared drive is fully mirrored to disk. People who mirror My Drive assume shared drives behave the same way and report it as a bug.
- “Sync broke after I changed a setting.” Switching modes moves your files. Going from mirror to stream changes the file location, and the old folder stops syncing — so people find their old folder sitting there with stale files and keep editing the dead copy. Going the other way downloads everything and uploads anything not already in the cloud, which can be enormous and looks like a hang.
- “All my files vanished.” In streaming mode the client is the filesystem. Quit it and the drive is gone. That is not a sync failure.
The macOS changes that break old advice
Drive for desktop now uses Apple’s File Provider framework, and this invalidates a great deal of what is still published:
- Drive now lives at
~/Library/CloudStorage, in the Finder sidebar under Locations. This location cannot be changed. /Volumes/GoogleDriveis gone. Any script, backup job or antivirus exclusion still pointing there is broken on every supported Mac. Worth knowing: Google’s own troubleshooting page still lists/Volumes/GoogleDriveas the antivirus exclusion path. That page is stale — exclude~/Library/CloudStorageinstead.- If the File Provider extension was never enabled, Drive appears empty or absent with no error. Finder → Locations → Google Drive → Enable.
- Paused means unreachable, not merely not-updating: “You can’t download files when syncing is paused.”
- Spotlight and QuickLook only work on already-downloaded files.
- Drag-and-drop MOVES rather than copies in and out of Drive folders. People drag a folder out to “make a backup” and remove it from Drive.
Also: the old kextcache repair still documented for Mojave and High Sierra should not be run. Those macOS versions are far below the current floor of Ventura 13.0, and the kernel extension it references no longer exists.
Windows-specific causes
Controlled folder access — the one to check first
Windows Defender’s anti-ransomware feature blocks non-allowlisted apps from writing to protected folders. Protected by default: Documents, Pictures, Videos, Music and Favorites — which is precisely the set of folders people mirror into Drive.
Windows Security → Virus & threat protection → Ransomware protection → Manage ransomware protection → Protected folders, then allow Drive through. You can verify this rather than guess: filter Event Viewer for Event ID 1123 (blocked) or 1124 (audited). If Drive appears there, that is your answer.
Long paths
Windows MAX_PATH is 260 characters including the drive letter and terminating null. Since Windows 10 v1607 the limit can be lifted with LongPathsEnabled in the registry — but Microsoft is explicit that applications must also opt in via their manifest, and we could not verify whether Drive for desktop does. Treat the registry change as worth trying, not guaranteed. The reliable fix is shortening the path by mounting closer to the drive root.
Drive letter conflicts
Streaming mode mounts a virtual drive, by default G:. A mapped network drive or an encrypted volume holding that letter causes a silent mount failure. Settings → Preferences → Advanced → change the drive letter.
Where Drive cannot live at all
Supported filesystems are NTFS, APFS and HFS+ only. Network volumes — SMB and NFS — are not supported. This is a large, under-reported cause of failure for anyone pointing Drive at a NAS, or running it on a roaming profile or redirected folder. There is also no Linux desktop client; Linux is web only.
System requirements as of September 2026: Windows 10 or later, 64-bit only (32-bit is not supported), plus WebView2. macOS Ventura 13.0 or higher.
On a work account, ask IT before you do anything
This is the section a home user never needs and a work user desperately does. A Workspace admin can turn off things you will otherwise spend an afternoon debugging — and these settings apply per organisational unit, so two colleagues in the same company can genuinely behave differently.
Admin console → Apps → Google Workspace → Drive and Docs → Google Drive for desktop. What lives there:
- “Allow Google Drive for desktop in your organization.” The master switch. When off, you simply cannot sign in to the app, while Drive on the web keeps working. This is the most common cause of “my Drive app will not sign in and the password is definitely right.”
- “Only allow Google Drive for desktop on authorized devices.” Sign-in on a personal laptop fails with no useful explanation.
- “Allow users to mirror My Drive.” Off means you are locked to streaming. Directly explains “why can’t I choose mirror mode?”
- “Allow users to sync local folders to Drive.” Off removes the add-folder backup feature.
- Auto-updates. An admin can pin you to an old version indefinitely — so a bug fixed months ago can persist on a managed fleet.
There are also policy keys an MDM can push silently. The ones that cause the most confusion: AllowedAccountsPattern (restricts which accounts may sign in on that device), DisableMirroredMyDrive, and bandwidth caps. If a setting you change keeps reverting, an MDM is overwriting it — on Windows via HKLM\Software\Policies\Google\DriveFS, on macOS via /Library/Managed Preferences/com.google.drivefs.settings.plist.
Two questions to ask IT before anything else: is Drive for desktop enabled for my organisational unit, and is device authorisation switched on?
Why a file someone shared with you does not sync
“Shared with me” does not sync to your computer. It is a permissions view, not a location — a list of items you can open, owned by other people, living in their My Drive. Drive for desktop syncs My Drive, shared drives, and mirrored local folders. Shared with me is none of those.
Two ways to get a shared item onto your machine, and they behave very differently:
- Add a shortcut to My Drive. It appears in Drive for desktop — but it is a pointer. If the owner deletes, trashes or moves the file, or revokes your access, the shortcut breaks. Storage still belongs to the owner.
- Make a copy. Now you own it, it counts against your quota, and it stops receiving the owner’s edits. That is a fork, and people do not realise it.
One thing worth knowing about shortcuts: their titles are visible to everyone with access to the containing folder, even people who cannot open the target. Creating a shortcut grants no access, but it does leak a filename.
New in version 121.0 (February 2026): you can now disable shared-drive syncing entirely, or stop syncing individual shared drives. That cuts both ways — it is the fix for one enormous shared drive destroying your machine, and it is a cause when someone toggled one off and forgot.
Reading what Drive is actually doing
Before you start resetting things, look at what the client is telling you. There is a hidden menu almost nobody knows about:
Hold Shift and click the Settings gear in the tray or menu bar. You get Generate Diagnostic Info, which drops a ZIP on your Desktop, and Enable verbose logging. Turn verbose on, reproduce the fault, generate diagnostics, turn it off.
| Platform | Log location |
|---|---|
| Windows | %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\DriveFS\Logs — read drive_fs.txt |
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS |
There is also a standalone diagnostic_tool in the install directory on version 103 and later.
Reset procedures, least destructive first
Every other article lists these. None of them tells you what each one costs you. That is the part that matters.
| Level | Action | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pause and resume sync | None |
| 2 | Quit and reopen Drive for desktop | None — in-progress uploads restart |
| 3 | Restart the computer | None. Clears stale file locks — the actual fix for “one file stuck forever” |
| 4 | Generate diagnostics and read the log | None. Do this before levels 5 and up |
| 5 | Check Lost & Found and copy it somewhere safe | None if you only copy. Do this before level 6 |
| 6 | Disconnect and reconnect the account | Files in Lost & Found are deleted. All offline selections lost. In streaming mode the entire cache is discarded |
| 7 | Reinstall | As level 6, plus loss of local preferences |
| 8 | Delete the DriveFS folder | Unsupported — see below |
The Lost and Found warning
When Drive cannot place a file, it puts it here:
- Windows:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\DriveFS\lost_and_found\<account_token> - macOS:
~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS/lost_and_found/<account_token>
Google states plainly that files in Lost & Found are deleted when you disconnect the account. Every article that opens with “just disconnect and reconnect” is telling people to destroy the only copy of files the client could not place. Check this folder before any disconnect, and copy anything in it somewhere safe.
On deleting the DriveFS folder
You will find this advice everywhere. There is no official Google documentation for it. Only community threads. Google’s supported equivalent is disconnecting the account. If you do it anyway: quit Drive completely first, back up Lost & Found first, and understand that you lose the entire local cache and any pending uploads not yet transmitted.
When it is not your fault
The Google Workspace Status Dashboard takes thirty seconds to check and rules out the whole category. Green is available, yellow is an advisory, orange is a partial disruption, red is an outage.
Two things it will not tell you:
- There is no separate entry for Drive for desktop. Only “Google Drive.” A desktop-client-only regression — a bad release, say — may never appear at all.
- It lags. Google posts after confirming scope, so a real incident can be half an hour or more underway before the colour changes.
| Real outage | Local problem | |
|---|---|---|
| drive.google.com in a browser | Also broken or slow | Works fine |
| Your other devices | Also broken | Fine |
| Other people | Also complaining | Nobody else |
| Other Google services | Gmail and Docs often affected too | Only Drive |
| Timing | Sudden, everyone at once | Started after you changed something |
Questions people actually ask
Why is Drive syncing so slowly?
In order: bandwidth throttles (Settings → Preferences → Advanced, in KB/s — an admin may have set these), then the 750 GB per 24 hours upload ceiling, then disk space (below a configured threshold the client stops writing cache entirely), then antivirus scanning every file in transit.
Does “Shared with me” sync to my computer?
No. It is a permissions view, not a folder. Add a shortcut to My Drive, or make a copy — and understand that a copy stops receiving the owner’s edits.
Can I make a whole shared drive available offline?
No. Shared drives can only be streamed. Individual files can be marked available offline; the drive as a whole cannot be mirrored, in any configuration.
What happens when my storage is full?
Files stay safe and remain viewable. But Drive stops syncing, you cannot create new Docs or Sheets, Gmail cannot send or receive and inbound mail bounces to the sender, Photos stops backing up — and your collaborators are locked out of editing files you own.
Where did /Volumes/GoogleDrive go on my Mac?
Gone. Under Apple’s File Provider, Drive lives at ~/Library/CloudStorage, in the Finder sidebar under Locations, and the location cannot be changed. Update your backup scripts and antivirus exclusions — including the ones Google’s own troubleshooting page still gets wrong.
Why can’t I choose “Mirror files”?
Either you are looking at a shared drive, which is streaming-only always, or your admin has unticked “Allow users to mirror My Drive.”
Why does my Google Doc show as 0 KB?
Because it is a pointer containing a URL, not the document. It has no meaningful size, cannot be usefully emailed or copied to a USB stick, and needs a network and a browser. By design, not corruption.
My photos stopped backing up from my computer.
Nothing broke. Google removed Photos backup from Drive for desktop — announced in version 126.0 in May 2026, reportedly effective 10 August 2026. Use the Google Photos website’s “Backup folders”, which only runs while the site is open, or the mobile app.
Drive will not sign in on my work laptop and the password is right.
Almost certainly an admin control. Drive for desktop disabled for your organisational unit, device authorisation blocking your machine, an account pattern restriction — or, on Windows since November 2025, a missing WebView2 runtime leaving the sign-in window blank.
Can I put Drive on a NAS or an external drive?
Supported filesystems are NTFS, APFS and HFS+ only. Network volumes are not supported. On macOS you additionally cannot relocate the streamed-file cache to an external drive at all, because File Provider hands that decision to macOS.
What we could not verify
Publishing this list is the point. Several widely-repeated claims about Drive have no Google source behind them.
- Filename characters that break sync. No Google documentation exists. The real constraint is the Windows filesystem, not Drive.
- Deleting the DriveFS folder as a cache reset. Community threads only. Google’s supported equivalent is disconnecting the account.
- Whether shared-drive files count against the organisation rather than the uploader. Widely understood, but we could not find a current Google page stating it. There is also an unresolved report of external users’ uploads counting against their personal quota.
- Whether Google Workspace native files count against quota today. Policy has changed historically and we found no current authoritative statement. We are not asserting either way.
- Whether the Windows long-path registry setting actually helps Drive. Microsoft requires per-app opt-in and we could not verify Drive’s manifest.
- The exact 10 August 2026 Photos cutoff. Third-party press only. Google’s release notes confirm the announcement, not the date.
- Whether the status dashboard covers desktop-client-only regressions. It lists only “Google Drive.”
- What changed in the maintenance releases. Google publishes only “bug fixes and performance improvements” for most versions.
The short version
- Open drive.google.com first. If the file is there, it is a download problem. If not, it is an upload problem. That one test halves the search.
- Check quota before anything else — and remember it blocks your collaborators too.
- Shared drives can only be streamed. Not a bug, not fixable.
- “Shared with me” never syncs. Add a shortcut or make a copy.
- Check Lost & Found before you disconnect anything, because disconnecting deletes it.
- Shift+click the Settings gear for diagnostics and verbose logging.
- On a work laptop, ask IT two questions first — is the app enabled for my unit, and is device authorisation on?
- If your photos stopped syncing, that feature was removed in August 2026. Nothing is broken.
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