Sunday, July 13, 2014

Google Drive error: "Sorry, upload of the file failed"

Symptoms:  Google Drive persists in giving the error "Sorry, upload of the file failed".  This occurs when using drag-and-drop or the "upload" button in the browser.  Errors occur regardless of file size.  A good test is to try and upload a tiny text file, to ensure bandwidth or other issues are not the problem.  Re-enabling Java in the browser does not help.

More info:  Google help had nothing on this error message, and as far as I could see, nobody else had reported this exact problem.  I'm guessing people who access Drive via their browser are in the minority.

I could not use the PC Drive interface in this instance since I was uploading video files that I did not want mirrored to my PC SSD.


Solution:  You're probably using an older browser.  It may have worked fine in the past, but Google is presumably always tweaking / upgrading the Drive interface. 

I have stuck with Firefox 14.0.1 up until July 2014 because I knew it and that version was still supported by the Google Toolbar, which I rely upon constantly.

As of July 13, 2014, Firefox 14.0.1 stopped uploading to Google Drive.  Or, at least, that is when I noticed the issue.  I had not tried uploading for 3-4 months so it could have occurred slightly earlier.

Since Google's first troubleshooting step will be to advise me to upgrade (and/or to use Chrome), I did not bother contacting them regarding the issue.

IE and Firefox 29 both uploaded with no issues, so I used a different PC with Firefox 29 to upload my files.  Multiple PCs, actually, since Drive is so slow to upload.

This might prompt me to actually try Chrome.

3 comments:

  1. Had a person with the same problem and I beleive they rebooted their computer twice and then tried to upload a word file and that worked and then they tried the original .pdf and that worked as well.

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  2. Hello All,
    I used to upload using IE8 and it worked great until about two weeks ago ...
    then IE8 became unsupported ...
    So, I had to switch to Chrome or Firefox, so I installed the last version of both, but neither one works ...
    With Firefox I cannot open any google page (Google Drive included),
    because of missing security certificates ... so it simply throws me out,
    though this is one of the very, very few supported browsers ...

    With Chrome I can open Google Drive, but when I try to upload even a very small file, it shows the "Uploading" window,
    without any progress even after a whole night ... it just keeps trying and trying and trying again, but never finishing,
    and not showing any error either.
    Then, when I press Cancel All, then sometimes (not always) it displays
    a message that "You are not online, some of the functionality may not be availabe" ...
    But this is not true ... I am online and I can continue to browse my Google Drive for the folders and files that were uploaded
    a longer time ago ...

    The problem is also not with the Chrome browser, because using the same browser, I could upload the same file in less than 1 second
    onto a different cloud drive web site ....

    The problem is the Google Drive + Chrome combination not working ....

    And, Chrome seems to be the ONLY browser that still can access Google Drive at all ...........

    Previously, with IE8 I could upload even very big files in seconds ...

    Very discouraged :( :( :(

    Any comments on this issue would be most welcome !

    Thanks a lot & Best Regards,
    Iudith

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  3. I uploaded a large folder yesterday (containing about 1500 photos). After completion I found a notification @ right bottom corner that 400 files within that folder failed to upload. I got an option to retry and in this attempt few of those 400 successfully uploaded. But accidentally i refreshed the page and that notification is gone.

    Now the problem is I do not know which are the files (about 350 of them) did not get uploaded. How can I get that very notification back again which remembers the history of that particular task? Do I have to upload the whole folder afresh?

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