Sorry for not offering any solution but for the future the adage that I learnt while working in a bank in India is, "Online means double work, i.e. don't stop making hard copies of each and everything you do online"
Since I don't use Google's products personally I haven't kept with the state-of-the-art in backup for the Workspace product. For my Customers who use Microsoft 365 I'm using the Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 product for this kind of situation. I guess I need to research the kinds of analogous offerings for Google Workspace.