Question

A platform engineer keeps a collection of operational bash scripts and gcloud helper aliases that they use daily from Cloud Shell to administer several Google Cloud projects. They report that after a few weeks of inactivity, some files they saved appear to be missing, while others in their home directory remain. They want to understand the behavior so they can reliably store their tooling. Which statement correctly describes Cloud Shell persistence and the recommended practice?

Accepted Answer

Files stored in the $HOME directory persist in a 5 GB user-scoped disk, but the disk is deleted after 120 days of inactivity, so scripts should be committed to a source repository for durable storage.

Answer

Cloud Shell provides no persistent storage at all; any file must be re-uploaded each session, so scripts should be pasted into the terminal manually every time.

Answer

The entire VM including installed system packages persists indefinitely, so no external backup is ever required for anything stored in Cloud Shell.

Answer

Only files outside $HOME persist across sessions, so scripts should be saved to /tmp or /usr/local to survive session recycling.