Google Drive is by far one of the most popular cloud storage platforms available to the general public, and to Android users, it’s pretty much a necessity to a point.
While more often than not, your user experience with Drive will be rather flawless, at times, the platform can act up and not exactly work as expected. In this article, we’re going over a few fixes for when your files get stuck at “waiting to upload”.
Also read: What is Google Drive? Everything you need to know
Reboot your device
One of the easiest and popular solutions to a bunch of seemingly random issues is simply rebooting your device. If your files get stuck while uploading, restart your device.
Check your internet connection
It’s also a good idea to check your internet connection when uploading. Check to see if you’ve got an active connection and that you’re connected to a WiFi network. If you’re on mobile data, make sure you’ve got good signal strength and that mobile data is enabled.
Check your storage
Free accounts on Google Drive get 15GB of storage that includes everything, even your emails. Unfortunately, if you’ve run out of space, you won’t be able to upload any other files on the drive, and any uploads you try will be stuck “waiting for upload”.
Update or Reinstall
Checking the Google Play Store for app updates isn’t a bad idea either. If you’ve got one, install the update immediately and try the upload again. If that doesn’t work, try reinstalling the app altogether.
Also read: How to upload files to Google Drive?
Force Stop the Drive app
Another thing you can do is force stop the Google Drive app and start it again. This can fix several glitches.
- Head over to the phone settings and tap Apps & notifications.
- Tap See all apps.
- Find Google Drive in the list and tap it to proceed.
- Tap Force stop.
Now restart the app, and it should start working again.
Clear app data
If force stopping the app didn’t help, you can try clearing the app’s data to help get rid of any corrupt files in the cache that could be causing issues. There are two ways you can do this.
- Using system settings.
- Using the Google Drive app settings.
Using System settings
Follow these steps to clear out the app data using system settings.
- Head over to the phone settings and tap Apps & notifications.
- Tap See all apps.
- Find Google Drive in the list and tap it to proceed.
- Tap Storage & cache.
- Tap the Clear data and Clear cache buttons to clear out the app’s data.
Using app settings
Follow these steps to clear the app data using settings in the Google Drive app.
- Open the Google Drive app and tap the three horizontal bars in the top left.
- Tap Settings.
- Under Documents cache, use the Clear cache and Clear size options to clear app data.
Restart your phone, and the uploads should work fine now.
Enable transfers over mobile data
By default, Google Drive doesn’t upload files over mobile data, but you can override this setting in the app to get your files off the upload list.
- Open the Google Drive app and tap the three horizontal bars in the top left.
- Tap Settings.
- Under Data usage, disable the Transfer files only over WiFi setting.
Your transfers should start working usually again.
Also read: How to manage your Google Drive storage?
