How to clear Google Drive syncing queue on macOS?

Question

Google Drive Desktop uploaded over 100K files to the cloud. However, the application shows that syncing is still in progress.

Reinstallation and re-login have not reset the queue.

How to remove Google Drive syncing queue?

Answer 1

I had to clear my syncing queue, but there were files in the list, with one specific file at the top it was stuck on, which came from a local folder I had set to sync to Computers. Instead of deleting the entire folder ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/DriveFS/[0-9]*, I tried to delete the minimal set of files possible, to avoid losing settings and clearing caches unnecessarily.

Through trial and error, I deleted several sets of files, listed below, starting and stopping the Google Drive client in between each, until the queue was cleared and syncing worked again. These paths are relative to the folder in DriveFS named as a long number: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS/117…

1. content_cache/d28, which I think contained the offending queued file. (The specific subfolder would likely be different for you.)
2. content_cache/chunks.db + the above folder
3. mirror_sqlite.db, mirror_metadata_sqlite.db, mirror_metadata_sqlite.db_local_counter, and mirror_metadata_sqlite.db_prefetched_ids
4. mirror_sqlite.db, mirror_metadata_sqlite.db, mirror_metadata_sqlite.db_local_counter, metadata_sqlite_db, metadata_sqlite_db_local_counter, and the content_cache items from sets 1 and 2

The client re-generated all these files each time I restarted it, except the subfolder of content_cache/ after set 4.

Set 4 is what ultimately worked to clear the sync queue, but it was probably not the minimal required set. If you want to experiment, you might try reversing the order of my progression and start with metadata_sqlite_db.

Answer 2

Quit the app and remove its data by the following command

rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/DriveFS/[0-9]*

More details in the article