I have no experience with this, but I imagine actually deleting files from some giant collection of data that needs to be safely backed up is borderline impossi

I have no experience with this, but I imagine actually deleting files from some giant collection of data that needs to be safely backed up is borderline impossible, no? I expect that the big tech companies have all kinds of cold storage backups and no one is going to actually go spelunking in those archives to physically delete my data when I delete an email. It's more likely that they will delete the keys to decrypt it, but even the keys must be safely stored somewhere, so it's the same problem just with less data.