They can restore them if they want. A guy here was a kind of big user in some tech support sub. He didn’t just delete…he used one of those account scrubbers to edit over all his comments a few times before nuking his account. Went back to look a few weeks later and all his answers were back.

They don’t do this with everyone because most people aren’t important to making a sub look useful and attractive but…yeah. They have everything we all ever said stored.

There is zero reason to believe the edit function replaces the previous post text in the database instead of just updating the posts pointer to the new text. Or maybe it would be more optimized to save the old text somewhere new. Editing posts might piss off mods, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the admins don’t care.

I’ve built data entity versioning/audit systems for web apps. Your comments can be undeleted, unedited, basically restored to any point in their lifetime by anyone with the appropriate access.