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I have a paid 100GB Google Drive plan. It is reporting that I am at 99% capacity.

According to the the storage both within the desktop and web application, I have used 90.53GB within Drive.

storage used

My Drive is mapped to my OS X filesystem, and when fully synched it reports only 61.28GB used.

file system

So what is going on here? I need to do a cleanup but cannot account for the 30GB difference.

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    Do you have a very large number of very small files? Every file has a certain minimum storage overhead, and that may be different on different filesystems.
    – Mike Scott
    Commented Oct 19, 2014 at 11:22
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    There is also a "Trash" folder. Did you empty that?
    – ale
    Commented Oct 19, 2014 at 12:32
  • @Al E. Wow I fell for that one when XP came out. My trash did have a lot of very large files in it, and I have emptied it. It didn't seem to make a difference. Strange.
    – port5432
    Commented Oct 19, 2014 at 12:37
  • @Al E. It has updated now. Looks like it takes some time to update the available storage after a large delete. Please add as the answer & I will accept.
    – port5432
    Commented Oct 19, 2014 at 13:00

1 Answer 1

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The most likely culprit is your Google Drive Trash folder. (Note: this name is localized. In the UK it's called "Bin". No matter what it's called it has the same function.)

Google Drive menu

The stuff in there will count against your quota. Empty that manually and it should help. Note that it may take a day or two for your quota to be updated.

Also, Google Drive keeps revisions of your files. (Anything older than 30 days and 100 revisions is subject to having older revisions removed.) Those revisions also count against your quota, though they won't actually appear on your local drive.

(h/t to Rubén)

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  • As of March 2016, the item in the menu is called bin, not trash.
    – kontur
    Commented Mar 3, 2016 at 7:03
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    @kontur: Nope. In the U.S. it's "Trash". (I created that screen shot yesterday.) In countries like the U.K. it's named "Bin".
    – ale
    Commented Mar 3, 2016 at 11:57

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