Another day, another inexplicable Google bug. This time we have Google Drive and backups in Android's settings. Some users, all of whom appear to be on Nougat, are seeing this message when they delve into their phone's settings to turn on backups to Google Drive: "Disabled by your admin."

You might think that this would happen if a G-Suite account is on the device and there's an admin blocking the feature, but nope. The users complaining don't have a G-Suite account on their device: they either never had one or they had it and removed it. You might think that this could be related to the device being recently factory reset and switched to a new account, but nope. True, it's happening in some of those cases, but it's also happening on freshly bought devices. You might think it could be linked to some Exchange accounts, SafetyNet checks, bootloader unlocking, root status, custom ROMs, Google Drive available free space, and a thousand other options, but nope again... It isn't.

Some users say that it looks like the error is only visual: things appear to be working fine when they visit Google Drive and see that their device is being backed up. Others maintain that the last backup is months old and the issue is definitely not just visual: it's really not backing up. And that not only means you don't have a recent backup, it means that even if you factory reset and try to restore an old backup, you won't even get the option to restore because the connection to Drive is disabled and hence restores aren't possible.

It seemed like a solution would be live in September, but that ship sailed 15 days ago, then a Google Drive support rep promised a fix in October. Now some are seeing it's working again, but the majority is still complaining and there are new reports of it happening.

All I can say is I'm sorry for everyone suffering from this. I just moved devices and noticed that the backup/restore function on Android is getting quite better and a lot of apps resumed where I left off as if nothing changed. Maybe shining a light on this bug will light a fire under the Drive team's keyboards and get them to fix it. Let's hope.

Source: Google Drive Forums, Nexus Help, OnePlus Forums, Stack Exchange

Thanks: ashjas