There is a popular Ruby gem which addresses this sort of concern: https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia Essentially i

There is a popular Ruby gem which addresses this sort of concern: https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia Essentially it doesn't delete but gives the impression to the user that it deletes. I like this idea because it really does guard against mistakes. I'm not sure if you have an ethical/moral concern with retaining data that a user thinks is deleted but that's another thing altogether (Personally, I don't.)