LogFS returns

Going back to _any_ point in time only works with near-infinite storage. If you ever write more data than fits your medium, something previously deleted will be overwritten.

The garbage collector makes things worse. As you might know, it has to copy around existing data in order to free larger segments. A corollary is that with a medium that is N% full, the worst case is that each segment is also N% full and the garbage collector will waste N% of the bandwidth, leaving 100-N% for the user to do real work. If your filesystem is 90% full, performance may drop to 10%.

So if the filesystem were to give any sort of guarantee that (some) old data could be recovered, the amount of available free space would drop, hurting performance. Definitely not a free feature.

Maybe I should add that performance does not necessarily drop as dramatically. If the filesystem did a good job when writing the data, it will have seperated long-living data from short-living data. To do so perfectly requires a chrystal ball, but even by pure accident, data that is written at the same time is often also deleted at the same time. Therefore the worst case of every segment being exactly N% full is exceedingly rare and real performance will better than the calculated worst case above.