# Google Drive backups fail with HTTP 502 but stay "active" (no retry, no notification)

**Project:** Bugs | **Votes:** 1
**URL:** https://roadmap.ploi.io/projects/7-bugs/items/1609-google-drive-backups-fail-with-http-502-but-stay-active-no-retry-no-notification

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Since 2026-09-22, about 1 in 3 of our Google Drive backups fail to upload. This happens for both database backups and file backups, on all of our servers (6 servers).

**What happens**

- The Google Drive API returns HTTP 502.
- The backup status stays "active", and "Last backup" is updated.
- No failure notification is sent. (Notifications work for other failures. We received "Backup ... has failed" for a different error earlier this month.)
- The upload is not retried. No file reaches Google Drive.

**How we found it**

The server log (Server → Logs, or `GET /api/servers/{server}/logs`) for the backup run contains Google's "Error 502 (Server Error)" HTML page. A successful run contains the usual `"kind": "drive#file"` JSON.

From 2026-09-21 to 2026-09-25 we counted 17 errors in 59 backup runs.

**Expected**

1. A non-2xx response from Google Drive marks the backup as failed and sends a notification.
2. The upload is retried with backoff on 5xx errors, for both database and file backups.

Google's Drive API documentation says 5xx errors should be retried with exponential backoff: https://developers.google.com/workspace/drive/api/guides/handle-errors

The post "The source control update" (https://ploi.io/news/the-source-control-update) says database backups have a try limit of 5 and notify on each failure. This does not seem to happen for this case.

We can share log IDs privately if that helps.