You're probably glad that you had the basics in place and made regular back ups of your data. Hopefully you didn't follow the "it's in the cloud so I don't need to backup" philosophy.
At least with office 365 you have a cached version of your email.
Google drive is hard as the only way is to setup continuous Google takeout's or use a third party service for backups which the last time I looked several years ago.
And still, after years and years and years people do not have backups, especially if they have their data in the cloud. From my experience the number of backups people make went down not up.
If my comment helped one iota to make backups more likely next time, I did good.
Except the problem is that you can't really back up Google documents. The file format is closed. You can, of course, periodically export them into common document formats. But you can't restore the same Google document and expect it back with all its functionality.
For the rest, you're completely right. Everything possible should've been backed up. It just has nagged me that a real backup isn't possible, and it has bitten me in the past (corrupted drawing, which corrupted related documents as well). Since then, I have only used the Google sheets/documents/etc. for throwaways and drafts.
There are multiple third party services which use the API to make daily copies of your documents, exporting them as MS Office documents. Yes, this isn't perfect, and you can lose some info in the files, it is pretty good for the most part. Nobody shpould be using G Suite without this, IMHO, because this happens too often.
I'm paranoid and tell people to print out data they can't backup and put it in a safe. I've always had some essential data printed out put in a fireproof safe :-) But yes Google is bad at this.
If you have critical data that can cost your company that you can't backup, your're living a risky life. Hopefully they've checked with their colleagues that those agree with living that risky life.
I could have said: Been there bought the T-shirt and I feel your pain. Which would be true. The person would have not felt better in any way because the data is gone, and would not have learned something either.
Does the person feel worse because of my comment? Don't think so. Either he already new and agrees with 'Yes, d* it should have done that, you're right' - what I felt someone said this to me - or he learned something. Perhaps if getting kicked hard enough he will not skip backups next time.
Does he feel bad? Sure.
Does anyone think about the people who he dragged down with him because he didn't have backups which would have been something he is paid for but didn't - do risking the jobs of everyone around him.
When consulting the FIRST thing I ask:
DO YOU HAVE BACKUPS FOR YOUR AWS/GOOGLE/... DATA?
And if not do it now - although the usually answer is: This is the cloud I don't need backups because they backup the data/redundancy/S3/... What about someone deleting it? By accident or itention? What about you getting sued by A/G/MS/...? What if they kick you of like XXX (Parler, ...)?
Most do backups to a another provider the same day.
Not having backups if you're the one responsible is not the same as getting cancer or being hit by a car. It's you've screwed up very badly endangering many other people.