[lerpa]

Exactly and they have the perfect excuse:

"Well when talking about deleting we mean we do the exact same thing the file system does to a file, it flags it, but doesn't actually erase it's content. Acting like a filesystem delete operation is what people expect when using that word"

[kerkeslager]

That would be somewhat reasonable if it were just an implementation detail. But unfortunately, it's not just an implementation detail. When a filesystem has data to write and runs out of hard drive space, it overwrites the data which was flagged for deletion. But when a web 2.0 company has data to write and runs out of hard drive space, they buy more hard drive space, usually automatically.

[icebraining]

It probably is an implementation detail. I'd bet you 64 days is time is takes for all their backups to be rotated.

Not that I think that's legitimate! Implementations can be changed, just like you could write a filesystem that shreds files when they are deleted.