The good news is that, not only are there backups, but you have direct access to those backups whenever you need (or want)! We use a service called Backupify that creates a searchable backup of all of your files in Google Apps (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, etc.) whenever you need it.
Here’s how to restore something that’s gone missing.
CAVEAT: you can only restore things that you “own” — so if a shared document goes missing, you need the person who shared that document to do the search, if you’re not that person!)
1. Go to the Google Apps menu…
2. click more to expose the “extended” options…
3. open Backupify.
4. Choose the area that you need to restore files from. (In this example, I’m restoring a file that I lost from Google Drive.)
5. Search for the file.
6. Check off the file that you want to restore and…
7. click the dark blue Restore button.
8. You’ll get some reasonable default options. Confirm that you really want to restore this by clicking the Restore button.
PRO TIP: In this case, not only do I know that name of the file I want, I know the actual file ID of it — I still had an email notification from sharing it back in the day, so I pulled the file ID out of that link. The link looks like:
https://docs.google.com/a/stmarksschool.org/document/d/1deKO3J7m8_zK65xYGbMgqCdNSngGMHI7dDYdEm6qJIY/edit?usp=sharing
And the file ID is the gobbledy-gook that’s highlighted in red — after d/ until the next /.
