Soft delete is a sensible default to prevent all sorts of problems. It's almost always good for a human to be able to get into the system and revert things if s

Soft delete is a sensible default to prevent all sorts of problems. It's almost always good for a human to be able to get into the system and revert things if something bad happened. It should just be followed up by hard delete several days or weeks later. The general policy should never be to hold things indefinitely. As a practical example I have soft deletion for more or less everything on my desktop. There are periodic filesystem level snapshots and those stick around until I manually GC them. It has saved me more than once.