How to STOP deletion of a Cloud Storage bucket in GCP Cloud Console

What if you need to delete a Cloud Storage bucket with lots of objects (tens of thousands or more)? As per GCP docs your options are:

• Cloud Console
• Object Lifecycle policies

Cloud Console is very handy in this scenario - a couple of clicks and you are done. However, using it to delete a bucket is akin hiring an anonymous killer - once you kick off a job there is no way to stop it. But what if it was a wrong bucket? - Sitting and watching your precious data melting away is a bitter experience

As you see, the above UI has no "OMG! Wrong bucket! Stop It Please!" button. However there is a hack to still abort a deletion job (othwerise I wouldn't be writing this post, right? :)

To abort the deletion job all you need to do is to call your fellow cloud admin and ask him to deprive you, termporary (or not?) of write permissions to the bucket in question. Once your user is not able to delete objects from the in question, the deletion job will fail:

Cloud Console performs deletions on behalf of your user so once your permissions has been snipped it aborts the deleton job. I only wish there was a "Cancel" button in the Console UI save us from using this inconvenient hack.

Of course data that was deleted up until abortion is aleady gone (15,000 objects in my example above) and the only way to restore it, aside if you had backups, is to have Object Versioning being setup in advance.