i'm an expert on this, haven gotten character restoration bans for a total of 6 months already.
You can simply ticket them, be sure to add in ur ticket or when you talk to the gm to mention if there is any gear on it, most of the time they'll mail it free or if you're a bit unlucky they'll c.o.d. it back.
Also I know from own experience they can restore characters that were deleted up to 2 years back. Not every GM seems to be able to restore very old ones though. I think you need to get lucky on your GM's experience.
But yeah, they generally keep restoring and restoring and restoring untill you ask for like 30+ restorations

Also keep in mind if you cannot see the restored character to make a "level 1" character to refresh the character list!