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That’s not how it works.

Deleted photos in google photos are not deleted. They go into a "trash" folder with a retention period of, if I remember correctly, 14 days.

So, yes, they could propagate but you have time to correct the mishap.

Exactly.

And if it’s a local backup, that local backup needs to be taken offline, to avoid the same issue if things get deleted in the cloud

Or use a versioned backup so you can recover from deletes or corruption. ZFS snapshots, restic versions, even rsync + symlinks can work.

> That's insufficient. If one of then screws up, deletions will likely propagate to the other.

That's not the setup described at least. It's both of the services withing in parallel. > I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously

Your scenario would depend on Google being a backup for Amazon or vice versa.