There is a setting in one's Google account to keep one's data forever or automatically delete it after a certain time period, perhaps they changed it?

(side note: the title of this post is a little sensational imo. the past has always "disappeared". Don't forget that you will die some day and eventually there will be no trace of your existence)

where is this setting?

In the "Activity Controls"[0] section of one's google account, there's an option for "auto-delete".

Now that I'm looking for it, I don't see Calendar listed as one of the products controlled here, but it might be grouped under GMail or something.

[0] https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols

Uh, my gmail stops at ~2009 or so...

I lost a bunch of emails from my now passed mother which I went to go look for, and found out that Gmail chopped history.

Yikes! Just checked and I have emails going back to 2000 (imported, account is from 2007) in my Gmail. It is a workspace account though.

Many offline calendar apps do prune old calendar items after a certain amount of time ... and sync that pruning back to GCal.

I've only got 1 year of calendar entries on the official Google Calendar app on an up-to-date Android 12 phone. A quick search suggests the mobile app only stores 1 year but allows searching of 2 years[0], but the desktop/browser one longer, so that must have been where I got the 2 years from. Unfortunately I'm out on my mobile now so won't be able to confirm desktop/browser until later.

[0] https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/818677/how-far-ba...

Try generating a Google Takeout from https://takeout.google.com/ and see what turns up in it.

While it's always interesting/practical ("just because") to have a full takeout sitting around locally, that would probably create a multiple GB tome (all of Gmail, Drive, ...) that would a day or two to generate and then potentially a while more to download, so for this experiment hitting "Deselect all" and then checking "Calendar" should be good enough.

The process of generating the takeout archive and downloading it are distinctly separate steps with some indeterminate amount of time in between, so you could very likely initiate the takeout from your phone, then follow up on the download link(s) it emails you when you get to a computer (IIRC the archive(s) hang around for a couple of days).

If you do indeed find deleted entries (nooo), I found that (a) Google Calendar itself has no auto-delete functionality (https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/3530801/how-do-i-...), but that if you have your calendar set up to sync with other software, that software might be issuing "deletion" requests (possibly under the guise of auto-cleanup...?) that is then getting synced back to Google Calendar (https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/8849196/my-calend..., https://www.makeuseof.com/events-deleted-automatically-googl...).

Back at a desktop computer now. Thanks for the tip. The only time I'd used Google Takeout was when I migrated away from Google Play Music, but in that case it generated 100s of gigabytes of data over dozens of zip files so I didn't do much with it in the end. Looks like it is quite useable for Google Calendar though. I've data going back to 2013, which is when I moved from an Evolution (offline) calendar to the (online) Google one, so it is quite possible it could go back longer for people who have been using it longer. And it turns out that my daughter had been to a birthday party at the same building and floor in 2014, but at a different door (flat 3 rather than flat 2).

My god you people are everywhere now...

> you people

Out of curiosity, what people are you referring to?

I assume they are referring to how the question posed by the GP was worded as if this conversation was happening on Reddit, and this is not Reddit.

Exactly that

I think that was a Poe's law moment.