After several weeks of some Google Maps users reporting that their timelines had been erased from all the places they had visited, as spotted by 9to5Google earlier this month, Google has confirmed that some users’ data has been deleted and in some cases is unrecoverable. In a statement to The Verge, Google spokeswoman Genevieve Park said: “We briefly experienced a technical issue that resulted in the deletion of Timeline data for some people.” According to the statement, only users who have enabled backups will be able to recover their timelines.
Google recently switched to storing data on the device and backups are not enabled by default. To enable them, you need to go to your Timeline in the Maps app and update your settings using the cloud icon. The incident resulted in some users losing years of location history. And while some users who had backups enabled before the issue occurred claim to have been able to recover their timeline data, other users on Reddit reported that they were unable to get everything back even after importing backups.
