In an article by the Atlantic it's stated that the books at least are kept around. > it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are ha

In an article by the Atlantic it's stated that the books at least are kept around. > it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t... They invested non-trivial amounts of money in scanning those books, deleting them would throw that money away. As for Usenet, it's similar: storing the data is cheap, and acquiring it again is probably next to impossible, so unlikely they threw it away unless idk it contains proof that sergey and larry have stolen their ideas from some usenet post or something.