How to restore a damaged file in Google Drive.
If you use Google Workspace, you will be familiar with storing all your files in Google Drive. It is a safe and secure place to store any file type, allowing you to share them easily.
As so many different programs can save files to Google Drive, sometimes programs can play up and damage or corrupt a file. To Google Drive, a file is a file, so if you overlook a corruption, you may accidentally save a file you didn't know had been corrupted on top of the previous save of the same file.
Thankfully, Google Drive keeps a revision history of saved files, so you can quickly revert to an earlier version if necessary. However, version history is not a replacement for a backup service. Google does not provide a full-fledged backup service for Google Drive, so you do need to deploy your own backup solution to have correct and proper backups of your Google Workspace accounts.
How to revert back to an earlier version of the damaged file.
You need to follow these steps to revert to a previous version of a file in Google Drive.
Open Google Drive on the web by going to drive.google.com.
Find the file you want to restore to an earlier version.
Right-click on the file and select File Information > Manage Versions.
A new box will now appear on the screen listing all the previous versions of the file.
Click on the three dots next to the version you want to restore.
Select Download.
Save the downloaded file back into Google Drive.
You have now restored a previous version of the file and should be able to open it from Google Drive. If you can still open the file, you need to continue restoring earlier versions until you find a version that works, as your file could have been damaged a while back without you noticing.
Why you need to back up Google Drive.
While you may get lucky using this restore feature in Google Drive, it is not designed as a backup replacement; Google does not offer a backup solution. It would help if you used a third-party solution to back up your Google Workspace completely. As part of the IT Assistance and Support by Kimbley IT package, a full business-level backup service is included to protect against these situations and other data problems.
