Trash and Recovering Deleted Records
Almost everything in the platform soft-deletes rather than genuinely deleting. Trash is where you find those records and put them back.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Data:
- Trash — the console — find and restore deleted records
- Record Retention — the one place deletion is permanent
Why deletion is usually reversible
A user deleting the wrong record is common, and irreversible deletion turns a moment's inattention into lost work. Soft deletion means the row is hidden rather than removed, so it can be restored.
Finding it
Trash discovers deleted records across datastores rather than requiring you to know where to look — which matters, because the person asking for a recovery usually describes what the record was, not which datastore held it.
What restoring does and does not do
Restoring returns the record. It does not automatically restore relationships that were themselves deleted, so a deleted parent restored on its own may come back without its children unless those are restored too.
Check the related records after any restore that matters. This is the common surprise.
The one exception
Retention disposal genuinely destroys. That is the point of it, and nothing in Trash can bring back a disposed record — which is why disposal sits behind three separate switches.
Trash is for accidents. Retention is for policy. They are different mechanisms and only one is reversible.
Trash is not a retention strategy
A soft-deleted record still exists. It is still personal data, still in every backup, and still discoverable in a subject access request. "We deleted it" is not true of a soft delete, and saying so is a misstatement worth avoiding.
If data should genuinely be gone, that is retention's job.
Worked example
A caseworker deletes the wrong referral. The team leader opens Trash, finds it by name and date, and restores it. The attached documents were not separately deleted, so they reattach. Total elapsed time about a minute, where previously this was a support call and a database restore.
Recommendations
- Restrict who can empty or permanently remove. Restoration is safe; the opposite is not.
- Check related records after a restore.
- Do not treat Trash as deletion when answering a data protection request.
- Investigate repeat accidental deletions — usually a confusing button rather than a careless person.