Soft deletes: pros, cons, and best practises

Soft delete, a crucial new data protection feature for Cloud Storage, works with all features and workloads

Soft delete is enabled by default since inadvertent deletions are prevalent and Cloud Storage stores business-critical data

Soft delete protection is more necessary than if you store long-term backups in another Google Cloud region, on-perm, or with another cloud provider

Left soft delete on all your buckets may just increase your cloud price by a single digit percentage

Cloud Monitoring metrics and the Metrics Explorer estimate bucket-level soft delete charges

To assist, they provided a soft delete billing impact Python script on Github that lists buckets in a project that exceed the billing effect

This may involve establishing new templates for short-lived data to prevent soft delete for buckets built from them