A roundup of folks that have lost their Timeline history

I'm a pretty lightweight Location History Timeline user. I've had it turned on for years and occasionally use it to figure out which food truck I went to three years ago or where some tourist attraction I saw was or something. It seemed like data I wanted to keep, so when Google warned me about the necessary steps to preserve my years of history in the shift out of cloud storage, I did them pretty much immediately.

And then when it all disappeared anyway a couple of months later I spent way too much time banging my head against a wall and trying to find anyone on the internet that found a solution. I didn't find that, but I found a lot of other people crying out for the same thing. Here they are.

Folks that followed the instructions

Folks that switched to a new phone while the times were a-changin'

Folks that...didn't touch anything?

...and then there's all the "yup, me, too"s in the comments. Android and iOS.

Has anyone got any solid information from Google about what's actually happening here or if they're even aware of the pattern? Here and there I see little bits of "they are aware of the problem and they are working on it" and a single person who said "It magically reappeared today." And then there's the tantalizing "Timeline backs up to Google servers over Wi-Fi when your device is charging and idle” and "You have encrypted Timeline backups stored on Google servers” notices that feel like the data's out there, somewhere, and all is not yet lost. But if it is out there it's being kept in a burning building that's going to collapse in December if not before, and probably they just shredded it as soon as I opted into the store-on-device scheme. Are there engineers feverishly restoring everyone one by one, or are we about to see a surge of people getting caught up in this next week as they move to their new iPhone 16s and only notice their Timelines gone after they've returned their old phones?

As I dug in more trying to figure out if there were still options before we hit the December deadline, I got into all the history of Google losing lawsuits and constantly getting Location History requests from police departments forcing them to make the big change. It kind of feels like this data's become toxic to them and they're now just driving as fast as they can on this with no seat belts or airbags and hoping another class action suit or P.R. debacle doesn’t blow up before they've got the noxious stuff out of their warehouses.