[dangus]

I think it may be as long as 180 days, but I haven’t found anything super specific from Apple.

Remember that Apple’s typical customer is non-technical. Keeping files in case of a catastrophic deletion is safer for their customers.

They want to give the person who calls them up and says “I deleted all my family photos 31 days ago!” A good experience.

[mnls]

If Apple truly kept files "a little longer" for customer service, you'd expect clear documentation of the retention period and working recovery tools

[dangus]

The 180 days is documented for iCloud device backups, but not documented for iCloud Drive.

I also don’t think you can make that assumption. I’ve worked for many companies where we had recovery tools we didn’t advertise to customers especially since it wasn’t a guarantee that they would work, and they involved manual recovery effort. We didn’t want to just give customers the idea that they could be sloppy and delete their data and depend on us to do a low level database restore.