[albert_e]

Not familiar with GCP but in AWS S3, if the bucket has versioning enabled -- any simple delete operation only places a "delete marker" on that object (soft delete).

Details for S3 -- https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/s3-undelete-configuratio...

If there is an analogous feature on GCP -- it might come in handy?

Does GCP support / account team for your organization have any suggestions?

If versioning is not enabled, even Amazon S3 does not offer a way of recovery in most cases. If it was a malicious attack or slip-up on AWS side -- there may be a possibility of at least escalating it via account management to get some engineering teams to investigate it deeper and attempt a recovery.

[Someone]

GCP has versioning, too (https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/object-versioning)

Because you still pay for storage of ‘deleted, but recoverable’ files, it isn’t enabled by default, though.