I delete files on the Cloud drive, but the changes are not reflected in the software

[MitchellStringer]

see the image below.

 

I deleted about 200GB but Clouddrive is still showing the google drive as full, and isn't updating, still shows as 500+GB if i log into Google drive.

 

i have tried cleanup, clearing cache and reauth (just in case)

 

[srcrist]

The "cloud used" amount refers to the space used on your provider, not the amount of data stored on the drive. When you delete something on your CloudDrive drive, it doesn't remove the drive architecture that has already been uploaded from from the provider. So, if it's a 500GB drive and you've already created and uploaded 500GB worth of chunks to the provider, those will remain, just like a real drive, to be used (overwritten) later. This is why you can use recovery software to recover data on your CloudDrive drive just like a physical hard drive. If you want to remove the additional space, you'll need to shrink the drive, which you can do from the "manage drive" options. 

[igobythisname]

I too have this concern. I just received notice from Google about exceeding pooled storage limit. I deleted about 2TB from my drive, ran the Clean Up in CloudDrive, but it did not reduce that amount of storage shown being used in my Google Drive

[Shane]

Just to check, igobythisname, did you use the Resize... option to shrink the drive after deleting the data from it? Running the Cleanup... option won't shrink the drive on its own, the shrinking has to be done first (also the Resize should attempt to automatically Cleanup after it finishes the shrink).

[igobythisname]

Hi Shane, I did not attempt the 'Resize' method; i'm downloading all my data from Google Drive to local storage and 'Destroy'ing the drives, that is working for me so far. Thanks for your response.

[Martixingwei]

On 5/23/2023 at 4:46 PM, Shane said:

Just to check, igobythisname, did you use the Resize... option to shrink the drive after deleting the data from it? Running the Cleanup... option won't shrink the drive on its own, the shrinking has to be done first (also the Resize should attempt to automatically Cleanup after it finishes the shrink).

Resize does not work as the minimum size is limited to the cloud usage not actual disk usage. I got a 127TB drive with 10TB data in it and 100TB of cloud usage. It only allows me to resize to 100TB not 10TB.

[jules66]

I've also had the problem where I've deleted the cloud drives but the changes haven't been reflected in google drive. Will running cleanup in SB CloudDrive purge the data from google drive?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Deleting files from the drive doesn't delete the data on the drive.  Shis is because the drive acts like a normal, physical disk, and the file system just unallocates the data (eg, the file is a pointer to that data, deliting the file just deletes the pointer, but leaves the data).  This is part of how and why data recovery works, and this also applies to the CloudDrive disks.

You'd need to use a utility like "sdelete" that zeros out the data, too. 

[xAndre]

It's time to implement permanently delete.
I have a pool of clouds and with the usually copy and delete the files the cloud grow up and i dont know shrink without detroing the cloud. Now i need to use sdelete to clean the cloud from unused files? CoverCube are crazy when implemented this feature.

[Todash]

This does seem to be an issue. I understand the idea of wanting recovery, but should cleanup not do this?

I am testing a new service and only have a 10gb cloud drive. I put a 9gb file on it to test and need to do more testing, but deleting from the mapped drive on my machine does nothing on the actual cloud provider. You need to at the very least implement a proper cleanup.

The fact that cleanup says "Clean up data in the cloud that is not longer in use" should mean reclaiming that space in the cloud. As it stands now it kind of seems useless. At least give us an option to do a proper clean or permanent delete or something like that so that what we see in the CloudDrive is reflected in the actual provider.

I really shouldn't need to get another 3rd party utility. Plus considering I want to use this for storing large backups and automatically deleting older ones, at this rate I would have to automate something else to ensure the old backups are actually deleted. 

Just to add to this, considering everything is stored as chunks on the provider you can't just delete them since you don't know what is what. So how do you go about reclaiming provider space if deleting from your clouddrive effectively does nothing? Using something like sdelete certainly won't work unless you are doing it at that exact moment. For example I have been using clouddrive for a few years with my google drive, at this point if I don't switch providers it will get full soon (almost at 10tb) and I will have no idea how to reclaim the space from previously deleted files that I had assumed were gone from the provider end as well. 

Without a proper cleanup option I fail to see myself continuing to use Clouddrive as it really isn't doing what I thought it was.

[Shane]

Cloud Drive works by creating a virtual reproduction of a basic volume and drive on the remote cloud service, down to and including the sector level; its consumption of actual physical space starts at a minimum point and expands up to the designated capacity as data is written to it, much like the VHDX virtual volumes as used in HyperV and similar environments.

Thus when you delete a file on CloudDrive the drive itself does not shrink on the cloud service, any more than when you delete a file on a physical drive the drive itself does not shrink inside your computer.

Similarly, just like a physical drive, the sectors occupied by the data of deleted files remain available for re-use by new files (or for recovery in case of accidental deletion); when you delete a file on the drive, the "free" space of the drive itself goes up just like on a physical drive inside your computer.

If you wish to free up actual space on your cloud provider's service for non-drive purposes, you should be using the Resize option of CloudDrive to shrink the drive; CloudDrive will automatically follow the Resize with a Cleanup afterwards to safely free up any excess used space on the cloud provider's service that is no longer required to support the drive.

To pre-answer "why can't CloudDrive automagically free up de-allocated space in the background and/or without resizing", I'd presume that doing so safely would require significant additional coding (I know VHDX has an option to compact without resizing, but not AFAIK while writable!) and the task itself would slow down the drive for users when it was happening so IMO it becomes a question of "can StableBit get enough ducks lined up in a row that it's worth adding this rather than doing something else".

But if you'd really like to have it do that, you can submit feature requests directly to StableBit via the Contact form.