Google is pretty proud of their record of not losing user data. As far as I know, they have never permanently lost even one byte of consumer data.
The same isn't true for GCP - there they lost some writes to customers persistent disks - but only ~50 megabytes worldwide, which is still rather good when you consider they store millions of terabytes.
> As far as I know, they have never permanently lost even one byte of consumer data.
It seems that every other day you learn about people being permanently locked out of of their Google account. Every byte of data stored in there is permanently lost to the person losing their account.
What if the policy is to lock accounts when data integrity errors are detected...
"We have always had better storage durability than Europa."
Note, I am not arguing that this is necessarily what happens. The thread full of contrary views on cloud storage just tickled this cynical take loose from wherever it was lodged.
> Google is pretty proud of their record of not losing user data.
As far as I know, they just haven't admitted to losing consumer data. Until they define that and put even a little bit of effort into checking whether it might hold true, they don't really have anything to be proud of.
There have been multiple mass-deletion events and Google has admitted to at least one of them - the infamous "only 0.02% of our users" incident, for example - but only because so many people were affected, the press picked up on it and google's PR firms couldn't keep it quiet.
It really depends what you consider lost. Thousands of users (at least) have been permanently and eternally cut off from their Google data after some AI system decided to axe someone's access to their own account. The loss is significantly over a byte. Or 50 MB.
They definitely had permanent data loss in App Engine around a decade ago, along with leaving any app active during the outage with copies of every database table to manually merge
