If a forum post is deleted by a moderator is there still a record of the post on the website's server or is it gone for good?

A nice alternative would be for posts be become hidden so that the person who made the post along with other moderators could still view the post and a moderator could unhide the post if deemed necessary.

We do have site backups daily. I am unsure if we could recover something that was up less than a day, but we do have logs of who did what with it. It needs some improvement for sure.

We need to clean up some of the system regarding editing/deleting posts. It may also require things like "hiding" posts and better sense of "locking" posts. Would probably also be good to allow controlled banning from single forums.