Re: oops...
This may not be feasible. If the script is designed to delete records the police have no legal right to hold then it should be a good-and-proper permanent deletion. Retaining things they have no right to hold - even in their transaction logs - should not be something they're doing. Same goes for backups.
Now in theory you might pre-emptively soft-delete things early, or pre-emptively age out records to archival storage so they can be retrieved if the proverbial hits the fan, but the fact this is a story indicates strongly the police are actively holding things for as long as they can and deleting them at the last moment. This would eliminate all the "normal" recovery procedures you could follow in a typical professional context. Once it's gone it really, really should be gone.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
