If the government is willing to spend the effort to investigate, they’ll find that deleted comment you posted 10 years ago criticizing the government.
But if you want to find your lost files after your cloud account gets suspended for vague “ToS Violations”, I hope you have a backup, because good luck trying to get the cloud provider to send you a copy of your files.
It might be out there, but not for you.
Unless you convince a government to try and get it for you. 🤔
I had this conversation with some non-tech savvy relatives a while ago. I think because they’d heard that adage they were under the impression that just by virtue of something being posted online it will remain there forever. Its more like once you post something online you can potentially lose control of it. So it could disappear completely if the site goes down, the file is corrupted or you remove it yourself and the platform or host you used didn’t keep a backup. But also someone could download/ screenshot it and even if whatever host agrees to delete it and any backups you still have no way to stop it proliferating, so you should act like everything you post will remain online forever.