GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 760335
A trash for every drives !
Last modified: 2021-06-18 15:32:39 UTC
Some time ago I proposed a new removable drives trash behavior for Dolphin (KDE files manager, and yes I use KDE too ;) ) : Removable drives: Ask to empty the removable drive trash (only that one) when you unmount it (https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=127201) Nautilus did that some time ago but that has been removed I think. And like David Edmundson, the Plasma desktop developer, said (https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=127201#p337776) "A prompt every time you unmount a USB pen sounds like it would become very tiresome very quickly". And even if I thought about it as an option that can be disabled I think he was right and it was not optimal. I thought about this again and I come with a better way to manage the removable drives trash that I proposed to Dolphin developers (https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=223&t=130133 - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357041) and I think it should be implemented in Nautilus too. But first let me remember you the situation as it is now. As you know there is no trash for the removable drives, there is only one for the system. At the moment you only have 2 "bad" solutions for emptying the removable drive trash. Either you emptying the whole system trash, but you not necessarily want to do this because you may have some deleted files from your HDD that you are not ready to completely delete, either you display the hidden files and delete the .Trash-1000 folder on the removable drives, but that's not really user friendly. So the new feature I suggest is simply to have a trash for every drive ! We should display a trash for every removable drives in Nautilus. After all each media have its own .Trash-1000 folder. That will also help people that are switching to Linux. They often don't understand why their USB stick become full whereas there is only some little files or no file at all on it. But if they see a trash that correspond to their USB stick they will understand than they can retrieve their files and empty the trash of the drive too. What do you think ?
I agree this is a problem. I can only think about the solution you propose, maybe there's a better solution? Do you know for instance what other OS like Windows or MacOSX do in this case? Marking the bug as ui-review to ask designers for feedback.
In Windows there is no trash for the removable drive. I don't know how Mac OSX behave. I really thought about this and I can't find a better solution. Since each media have its own trash it's legit to handle each them independently.
By the way that is also useful when you have multiple drives or partitions. With this feature you can empty only the trash of one particular drive without touching the others. I'm still hoping for feedback ;)
> I'm still hoping for feedback ;) You can check with designers in the gnome channel about this to get feedback. They usually have limited time, so you might need to try multiple times.
Ok I will try. What is the right channel ? irc://irc.gnome.org/nautilus or irc://irc.gnome.org/gnome or an other ?
gnome-design at irc.gnome.org
Ok, thank you Carlos.
I see two kinds of removable media. One is a limited space "transporter" media, such as SD cards or USB thumbdrives, which do not hold much "permanent data". You use them to transport files rather than keep them. If we continue using the trash concept of trash for these kinds of media, we end up having an "empty" sd card, putting it into a camera and not being able to capture any more footage, because it is in fact, full. The other kind of removable media is a large capacity disk/ssd which in reality is no different to an internal drive. You just happen to no have any room in your device or perhaps share a large drive between two machines (video editing). Adding complexity in managing multiple trashes doesn't sound like an improvement to me. My initial thought is to only address the "oops I hit delete by mistake" issue with file deletion for "transporter" media, not the "I deleted a file last week, maybe it's somewhere in the trash" use case. We already do undo using the in-app notification. The implementation detail would be to empty the trash for "transporter" media on eject without explicit user action.
I don't see any complexity in a trash by drive ! If you empty the trash on eject without explicit user action that can be dangerous. User will lost their files.
The most important thing is now you can't empty only one drive (removable, internal, partitions) without emptying the others. A trash by drive as they each have a .Trash folder, solve the problem without that much complexity.
Created attachment 327002 [details] A trash by drive in the actionbar
(In reply to jeremy9856 from comment #10) > A trash by drive as they each have a .Trash folder To be more precise, a trash by drive, whether they are internal, external, partitions, in the futur actionbar and keep the system Trash in the left panel that allow you to empty all the trashes at once.
Perhaps a good idea is to have a way to show the Trash grouped by origin with the possibility to empty only one drive.
(In reply to jeremy9856 from comment #13) > Perhaps a good idea is to have a way to show the Trash grouped by origin > with the possibility to empty only one drive. We can be simple by default (current behavior) and, with a shortcut like shift+right click on the Trash, be more powerful and show the Trash grouped by origin with the possibility to empty only one drive.
> not the > "I deleted a file last week, maybe it's somewhere in the trash" use case. We Hm not sure about this, it's not that we can know whether the external sd card is going to be use in a phone with permanent data or not. But I can see your point. So I believe your vision is consider trash of removable devices only for the "oops I accidentally deleted it right now", which one can undo in the in-app notification or ctrl-z. In that case, showing the items on the external device trash doesn't make sense, so we will only have trash for the internal device right?
In Windows you don't have a trash for external drives. When I used Windows it wasn't a problem and I think it's not a problem for most people since almost everybody (90%) use Windows. That will fix the "I can't copy new files to my USB stick whereas there is no (visible) file at all on it". So removing the trash for external drive can be done but some users will be surprised by this new behavior and will lose files they thought they can retrieve. If this is done it have to be handled carefully. That said I still think that if there is multiple trashes on a PC (multiple internal drives, partitions, etc...) we should be able to empty only the one that we need. Maybe with a way (a shortcut like shift+right click on the Trash) to show the Trash grouped by origin with the possibility to empty only one drive.
So is a decision has been made ?
When a decision is made, it will be post here. Basically any real update would be here.
(In reply to Carlos Soriano from comment #18) > When a decision is made, it will be post here. Basically any real update > would be here. Ok great. What do you think of my last suggestion : - No Trash for external drives. - A System Trash (like now) with the ability to empty only one drive Trash, in case of multiple internal drives / partitions.
I'm unsure whether we don't want to cover that case. But I guess cleaning up trash when ejecting would be fine. I would like to contrast with more people about this.
I don't think that cleaning up trash when ejecting is a good idea because it take time.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version of Files (nautilus), then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.