Technology

Eh, either that specialist doesn't understand how cloud storage works or the author isn't doing a good job of explaining it. Because it sounds like the specialist figured out how deletions work on your home computer's hard disk and tried to shove that into some info they searched for on the internet about distributed storage or sharding. What was described is absolutely not how that data is stored in the cloud. The question of "when is my data actually deleted" is completely valid but the explanation is a mashed together pile of dog shit.

Google likely stores small clips of the full video stream (which they did explain) but in object storage. These clips are probably used for training AI and deleted after some period of time according to a retention policy that might soft delete the data first before removing it permanently. And maybe they do replicate the data to keep it safe, but also maybe not since it's just for training. Since the customer didn't have a plan that included storage, there's no reason for them to persist the data after they've trained with it. It's just a waste of storage space costing them money at that point.

They could also store the clips in block storage but all those little pieces on the filesystem would be in the same data center, maybe region, but definitely not all across the world for a single file.

And I guarantee you there was no forensic analysis on any storage devices for this. The reason it took so long to retrieve was probably from back and forth with the feds and deliberation within Google's legal and management teams. Then once that was sorted, some poor prick probably had to manually dig through some services to find the file and grab it.

TL;DR: Google does hold onto your data longer than most people think but that "expert" doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about. Bureaucracy and manual processes likely drug out the process, not forensic analysis.