title: google cloud hard disk deleted. all data lost
body: <p>My google cloud VM hard disk got full. So I tried to increase its size. I have done this before. This time things went differently. I increased the size. But the VM was not picking up the new size. So I stopped VM. Next thing I know, my VM got deleted and recreated, my hard disk returned to previous size with all data lost. It had my database with over 2 months of changes. </p>
  
  <p>I admit I was careless not to backup. But currently my concern is, is there a way to retrieve the data. On Google Cloud, it shows $400 for Gold Plan which includes Tech Support. If I can be certain that they will be able to recover the data, I will am willing to pay. Does anyone know if I pay $400, the google support team will be able to recover the data?</p>
  
  <p>If there are other ways to recover data, kindly let me know.</p>
  
  <p>UPDATE: </p>
  
  <p>Few people have shown interest in investigating this.
  This most likely happened because by default "Auto-delete boot disk" option is selected which I was not aware of. But even then, I would expect auto-delete to happen when I delete the VM, not when I simply stopped it.</p>
  
  <p>I am attaching screenshot of all activities that happened after I resized the boot partition. <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/mNBcr.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/mNBcr.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>As you can see, I resized the disk at 2:00AM.
  After receiving resize successful message, I stopped the VM.
  Suddenly at 2:01, VM got deleted. 
  At this point I had not checked notifications, I simply thought, it stopped. Then I started VM hoping to see new resized disk.
  Instead of starting my VM, new VM was created with new disk and all previous data was lost.</p>
  
  <p>I tried stopping and starting VM again. But the result was still the same.</p>
  
  <p>UPDATE:
  Adding activities before the incident.</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/RBWKc.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/RBWKc.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>