Help - I deleted my work

The title says it all. I put a link to the application I was developing on the desktop and then deleted the application, thinking I was just deleting the link. Silly boy. I will now rebuild it from scratch ( it’s good for the soul) but for future reference is there a way to undelete something like that? Thanks.

The quick answer is no.

The very slow and painful answer is maybe.

If you immediately stop using the machine, and use DiscKnight’s Advanced option “Recover deleted files” then reboot, it will have turned all the free space in the disc in to non-usefully named and untyped data files in the $.Lost+Found directory. You then need to search through these for any likely content within the files, and copy any useful parts to another disc (as the original disc is 100% full). Only when you’ve finished delete $.Lost+Found and it’s contents to get the free space back.

Thank you David. That is what I thought, but it is good to be certain. I should be able to reconstruct what I have done as it turns out.

It always turns out better the second time!

The quick answer, for the future, is to install Transient with TrapDelete from this page
Set your required retention period, and at anytime in that period you can restore anything.

and say what a wonderful person Fred Graute is, regularly.

One of the features missing from RO5 is the recycle Bin feature, which would be handy to have which was in RO4 and SIX

One of the features missing from RO5 is the recycle Bin feature, which would be handy to have which was in RO4 and SIX

The correct description is “One of the features not built into RO5” – but, as above, install Transient with the TrapDelete module and you do have a “Recycle Bin”
BTW. RO4 (as in RO4.02) did not have a Recycle Bin built in. That was only the Select/Adjust development line labelled as RO4.3x / RO SIX

it was still a useful feature from select/adjust that wasn’t built into RO5, was there any reason it wasn’t added? just curious as i’ve recently just moved from RO6 to a Titanium machine.

RO4 was a post-Acorn development of the OS by RISC OS Ltd and further developed as RO4.3x / RO6

RO5 was a different branch developed by/for Castle, as a 32-bit OS because the system they were developing had a CPU with no 26 bit mode and, because politics, ROL and Castle didn’t agree with each other on a number of issues. The label jump to RO6 shows the level of one-upmanship they had descended to.

Large amounts of the ROL development are not in the RO5 development, allegedly some talks have occurred with the current rights’ holder(s) about possibly making that source available.
As it stands, it isn’t.

That all skirts around the happenings in a period best left aside.
Aside, not forgotten, as the old saying does say that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and you can’t learn from something forgotten.

I have just (re)installed !transient with the ‘wastebasket’ and it seems to work a treat. Who new? Thank you Steve, and thank you Fred.

Thank you Steve, and thank you Fred.

Nah, thank-you Fred, and thank-you Fred.
All his work adding TrapDelete to Transient when I was wittering on about RO5 needing that kind of thing.

Hi,
This would be a good time to take stock of the differences between having a “trash can” with Risc OS.

There are several applications (!TempBin, !WasteBin, !DustBin, etc…) and I would like to know if one of them is recommended.

I’m going to test !Transient, which I just discovered….

Note: I’m using the Filer property, file operations: Confirm only deletes ( this should be the default option!)

The major difference between the many different Dustbin/Wastebin/Trash etc. is that you manually move the deletions to that new location and restore is a manual process, putting things back where they were – if you can remember that. Some more advanced setups catch the deletion and put a collection of loose files in the bin.
Empting the bin is a similarly manual process. Restoring can be awkward.

Transient – with TrapDelete – catches the delete action, and stores the information required to put the deleted file, directory tree or application back where it was, as per user configuration the deleted items can be expired/emptied from the bin after a user configured period.

More people should install Transient and thoroughly road test it.
If you find some feature you expected to be missing – let Fred know, he can’t add features you want if he doesn’t know.
Similarly, there may be obscure use cases that generate an error – contact Fred, he can’t fix faults that haven’t been reported.

It always turns out better the second time!

That’s my experience too!

@ Jean

My +1 goes to !Transient, but in all honesty I haven’t tried the others that much.

!Transient is OK if you are prone to randomly deleting stuff, but flash media can suddenly and totally fail, so need to ensure you have a regular automated backup to external storage.

Even if you haven’t randomly deleted stuff, check frequently that you can recover important files from the backup.

I did some comparisons, and indeed all the “xxxbin” applications do not allow a restoration, if we have forgotten the original location and the backup is manual, so accidents = Ko

!Transient does the job, I think Enable Trap should be checked by default….(just an opinion)
Thanks to all and especially to Fred (thanks for the source files, I really appreciated the flowcharts)
!Transient is installed at startup on my machine.

( it’s good for the soul)

I have another question of the same kind (this could be another thread!)
It’s about the soft links for the file, I’ve been using !Links for some time and it works very well, but as for the “xxxbin” it seems to me that there are equivalents.
If there are any who want to give their opinion and share their experiences, it’s very interesting, thank you.

One feature missing from Transient/TrapDelete is trapping overwritten files (unless I’ve missed it somehow). Recycler from Fabis used to trap these as well as deletes etc. on the RiscPC but of course isn’t 32bit. I found it a very handy feature when I’d loaded up a file to use as a template, edited it and then hit save instead of saving with a new name, so overwriting my original with the now edited file (D’oh!).

I would’ve thought that setting an important file to read only would prevent accidental overwites.

Drucks thoughts about flash media – does that mean that spinning rust has some advantages?

Is there a way of checking that a picture has not been corrupted?

Wouldnt it just be a file hash checksum to confirm if corruption or bit rot has occured filesystems like ZFS do this automatically

Drucks thoughts about flash media – does that mean that spinning rust has some advantages?

Spinning rust may start to fail in a way which can be detected early, however just as often it doesn’t.

The only way to keep data safe is to backup the data to as many different places as possible. Backup at different frequencies to different drives such as daily/weekly/monthly, make sure you have at least one copy in a different physical location in case of disasters. Backups need to be automated, as otherwise the time you need it will be the time you forgot to do it, and make sure you test that recovery works on each one.

Spinning rust may start to fail in a way which can be detected early, however just as often it doesn’t.

Indeed. My most memorable failure, under Mac OS, was when the computer suddenly chastised me for disconnecting a drive without dismounting it first. It was spontaneous failure and that drive never worked again. Fortunately it was under warranty and I had a complete backup.

flash media can suddenly and totally fail

So can spinning rust. It’s happened to many of us.

Flash media can, in principle, be checked to see if failure due to wearout is imminent, but we don’t have the tools.

SSDs support SMART information so can tell you, but none of the ones I’ve had for the last 10 years are anywhere close to the limits, and I’ve not had one pack up yet to see failure mode.

On the other hand I’ve had plenty of SD cards fail, but these don’t support SMART. However, Samsung cards and most SanDisk ones tend to signal write life exhaustion by going read only, which usually allows the data to be recovered. Some of the other cheaper brands have either gone extensively garbled, or completely dead.