TL;DR Laravel's Eloquent provides a feature called "soft deletes" which allows you to mark records as deleted without actually removing them from the database, enabling easy retrieval and restoration of deleted data. Soft Deletes in Laravel: Eloquent's Trashed Feature As developers, we've all encountered the problem of permanently deleting data from our databases. What if you wanted to "un-delete" a record that was mistakenly removed? Or perhaps you need to keep track of changes made to your database over time. This is where soft deletes come in – a feature provided by Eloquent's Trashed functionality in Laravel. What are Soft Deletes? Soft deletes allow you to mark records as deleted, but don't actually remove them from the database.
Laravel's SoftDeletes trait enables "deleting" records without removing them from the database by adding a flag/column to indicate deletion status. This allows for easy recovery of accidentally deleted content and maintains a record of deleted items.
Laravel's $user->delete() method can soft delete records by default, but throws an exception when deleting associated records. To bypass this, use forceDelete(). This allows for easy retrieval of deleted records and more efficient deletion in Eloquent.
