“Anyone who would design a system that was this vulnerable should not be in IT!”
UniSuper had backups, stored them at a different site, with a different service, and restored successfully from those backups. So props to their IT team. They had a system and a plan.
But shame on Google’s team for a flaw this bad.
It’s good to have your own backups, either locally or with another “cloud” service. I can easily imagine some bean-counters saying “it’s too expensive to have a second backup system, Google knows what it’s doing”.
On a separate point, was having the field in question blank even valid, given its disastrous effect? If not, why wasn’t there an error message when the configuration was applied? (Or a warning, if the blankness was valid but unusual?)