I would never recommend my method for every type of application nor perhaps even most. However, I have had great success with not using soft deletes at all. I j

I would never recommend my method for every type of application nor perhaps even most. However, I have had great success with not using soft deletes at all. I just write the records to a duplicate table then hard delete the records from the main table. Of course, in a system with 1000s of tables, I would not likely do this. But for simpler systems, it's been quite a boon.