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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

Can't agree with you there. I've never seen a situation in which it was necessary to recover "optimistically" soft-deleted data. I have seen multiple situations in which soft-deleted data was accidentally included in live queries.

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Not recover, but explain to the users that the data was deleted, and when it was deleted. If you have to provide support to customers, you will get a steady trickle of confused and angry customers wondering why their data disappeared after they (or their coworker, etc.) deleted it. Soft deletes let you answer those inquiries confidently with very little effort. With hard deletes, complaints like that can eat up support time with no satisfactory resolution.

I haven't experienced soft-deleted data being accidentally included, but I think that's because I've worked with systems that included soft deletes from the very start.

Perhaps Tombstones would be a better choice, where ether data is deleted, but a record of when and why is included instead?

Difference being here a tombstone doesn't contain enough information to recreate the record should it be necessary. Guess it's a tradeoff whether you want a graveyard you can use digital necromancy on, or simply an indicator why the data got yeeted.

From a customer support PoV, soft deletes have the wonderful property that you can assuage the upset / irate individual on the other end of the phone that their data can indeed be recovered from whatever mishap they just engineered and do so with a simple query.

Yes - backups can help - but without live backups (WAL shipping or equivalent) you still risk some form of data loss. And if you have those, you just have soft deletes on a system level rather than an in-DB level + a vastly more complex system of partial restores.

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