I have been thinking about it for some time and I'm concerned that if a big instance like lemmy.ml goes down does the content hosted on lemmy.ml will be deleted too or a copy of the content will be available on other instances?
I'm still pretty new but I believe federation works like syncing. You can see that at Beehaw, they defederated Lemmyworld so any communities from lemmyworld are still visible, but no longer updated.
Edit: I should mention it's not exactly like syncing, because federation won't sync backwards in time (for example is A defederated from B for three days, when they refederate they will see new posts but not what they missed in those three days.)
But if they stay federated then the copy should be mostly identical in terms of content.