Enhanced Trash functionality

[Sean Middleditch]

On Thu, 2003-11-27 at 11:57, p.carsten at arcor.de wrote:
> Hi folks,
> interesting thoughts about the trash. Is it not just the undelete
> feature you are missing? Well, I allways thought of the trashbin as
> just another M$ example how to not fix the real problem but to pretend
> to be "innovative" and pitch a new "feature" or "technologie".

I don't believe Microsoft thought it up to begin with, but I guess that
doesn't stop most people from bashing them uselessly anyhow...

> 
> Wouldn't you like a cool undelete feature on the filesystem level?
> Otherwise I bet when I have the need to recover a file I will have 
> forgotten to use the "tra" or the app just hasn't had support for it
> or for any other non transparent tool.

It would be nice, except that we already have a metric shitload of
filesystems in use that don't have this feature, especially on older OSs
or proprietary OSs that we can't change.

> 
> In storage recovery I see three prinicpal issues.
> 1) Make latest state robust against technical failures (use
> raid-mirror or distributet fs i.e. intermezzo)
> 2) Make latest state robust against human failures and malware (fs
> undelete)
> 3) Make older states available "version control" (occasional plain
> backups, snapshoting or best "copy on write fs's")
> 
> If there is a good transparent solution to 2) unfortunately I haven't
> heard of it yet.
> For 3) I run this cool rsync/hardlink snapshot method from
> http:/www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots (Rob Bos' Package)
> every hour. With it I "fade out" old versions and deleted files in
> max. 18 month, depending on the time and duration of existance.

I believe these are all either way too complicated or just too fragile. 
A versioning file system would be best, perhaps, but then again we have
the fact that our filesystems *aren't* versioning, so its a completely
moot point.  We *can* get a trashbin implementation on every desktop, we
*can't* get a versioning filesystem everywhere.  If, in the future, the
majority of desktops (or even a couple desktops) have versioning, the
trashbin API/UI could easily just wrap around that, so we wouldn't be
forcing ourselves to not move forward, either.

> 
> The trashbin would just have to be a frontend showing the user's
> deleted files on the /home filesystem ("ls -R --deleted"?). They
> should be available read only for him through the fs anyway.

This is one thing I like- make the trashbin readonly for files.  Too
many users in Windows or whatnot have a habit of using the Trash can as
a normal storage area; making it impossible to edit/use document in
there without removing them first would be a keen idea, I think.

> 
> Peter -- Thinkin' more the unix-way?

Perhaps.  I think versioning filesystems are actually a little
non-UNIXish, but that's more a philosophical debate than anything
useful.

Good idea, just not something we can hope to rely on at the moment.
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.