Rethinking the Recycle Bin
Yao Ziyuan
undeletion in the 2010s. The key points are:
(1) ALMOST NEVER DELETE DATA PHYSICALLY. Today's new computers usually
come with 500GB+ disk space, so deleting files to save space is less
and less a necessity. So a new Recycle Bin concept could always
preserve deleted files physically until there is really a space
shortage or the user intends to permanently eliminate private
information immediately.
(2) FOCUS ON THE REASON, INSTEAD OF THE DATA. Sometimes we have a
reason to delete a file or folder, but later we have a new reason to
recover it, and later we may have a new reason to delete it again...
We humans are not used to reviewing all possible reasons for deletion
and undeletion all at once. So I think the role of the Recycle Bin
should be a journal for the user to record his reasons, from time to
time, for a file/folder's "deletion" and "undeletion". For example, a
user may like a game, movie, song or other type of content at one time
but wants to delete it at another time but later wants to recover it.
It's really all about his reasons to hate or like the same content
over time. It's really about the user's scoring and commenting about a
file in the file system, rather than the file's physical necessity to
exist or not. If the user gives a file a very low score and a comment
about why it's so undesirable, the file can be hidden in the Recycle
Bin. If the user later has a mood to recover it, the user will be
shown his previous comments about this file and determine if he really
have new, good reasons to undo his previous decision.
Yao Ziyuan
And if the OS really has a disk space shortage, it can find out which
files/folders have the lowest user scores (the same file can receive
different user scores over time, so we can, say, find out the files/
folders that receive the lowest average scores over the past 12 months
or so) and suggest them to the user for physical deletion.
Yao Ziyuan
Or think it this way: "For a recycle bin, there is always another
recycle bin in it." We can have 99 levels in this "recycle bin stack".
If you want to "really" delete a file in a recycle bin, it always goes
down to the next level recycle bin. If you want to retrieve a file,
you need to go down to the level of recycle bin it resides in.