You’re in for a rude awakening then with most file systems then. Delete just means “unlink the pointer to it in the file system” for the vast majority of file systems. It might get deleted when it gets overwritten… sometime in the future maybe. I assume this is exactly what happened here.

Hasn't been that way in a decade. If you use nand flash there's a huge chance you're using trim which will periodically overwrite "not in use" blocks to avoid a write penalty later as writing to an empty page is much quicker.

However, "unlink the pointer" has been good enough for ages.

The data is effectively deleted short of an application having the privileges to read the underlying raw block device and having an understanding of the raw filesystem structures to be able to search though that unallocated, raw space and reconstruct file entries.

No application outside of special-purpose data recovery apps (and even then you'd need to run them with elevated privileges) would have any reason to be capable of this, so in practice a deleted file means it is deleted from the perspective of the vast majority of applications.

Similarly, SSD TRIM is also irrelevant - TRIM'med space is hidden from the host. Sure, an intentional tool exploiting some undocumented vendor command or side-channel could probably recover it but again you'd have to do this intentionally.

The default delete behavior is not that, and it is explicitly documented as such.

> When you delete photos and videos, they go to your Recently Deleted album for 30 days. After 30 days, they'll be permanently deleted.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/104967

If you then delete from the Recently Deleted album it says that the photo “will deleted the selected photos from iCloud and all connected devices”.

Additionally, at least in iOS 17.5, the Recently Deleted album itself has a disclaimer at the bottom that says that “items will be permanently deleted. This may take up to 40 days.”

"This may take up to 40 days"??? what?! Permanent deletion of local files may take over a month?

iCloud is a pile of crap with eventual consistency everywhere, including some really extreme interpretations of "eventual": I've had deleted "favorite places" on Maps persist for years. Deleting them would hide them from the local device, yet restoring a brand new device would bring them back.

The whole thing feels like it's running on duct tape, wishful thinking and a large chunk of non-technical users that would blame themselves rather than the shitty tech when weird things like this happen.