As an administrator you might have received the following email from Google:

Dear G Suite Administrator,

Our records indicate that you have performed one or more Data Export(s) between May 9th, 2018 and October 4th, 2019. We are writing to inform you of a recently-discovered issue where Shared Drives are not correctly exported if the Administrator initiating the Export does not have ‘Manager’ access level on the Shared Drive(s) themselves. As a result, your Data Export archive may not have included files located within some Shared Drives in your domain(s).

If any of the affected Shared Drives’ files were deleted by users or Administrators after the Data Export took place, Google can, upon your request, attempt to recover and restore these files to the extent that we can accurately do so. If you would like us to attempt to recover available data, please contact Google Support no later than 10:00am PDT October 21st, 2019 and provide reference number XXXXX6427.

Google is working to resolve this issue, and we will update our help center article with more information when this limitation is resolved. Please also review this article to understand other limitations on the categories of G Suite data supported by the Data Export tool. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience caused by this issue.

Sincerely,

The G Suite Team

Am I impacted?

If you did not receive an email from Google or us about this issue, you are not impacted. 

If you received an email like this from us or Google we are aware of this problem and you might be impacted. The impact is likely minimal as it only impacted you if you exported data and deleted the remaining data on the impacted Shared Drives.

What can I do?

If you feel you are impacted please contact Google Support or us and we are happy to assist you with the mitigation.  Google might be able to restore data.

When contacting Google or us please use the following reference NO LATER THAN October 21st 2019 (2019-10-21): XXXXX6427