smart „trash bin“

UX designers have been talking for ages that computer interfaces should avoid asking for confirmation when that can be replaced with making the action reversible. And Amazon has been making huge profits applying this approach in its „one-click buying“. Another familiar example is the „trash bin“ for deleted files. I despised it in my years of teenage maximalism, but now I almost always „delete“ files in it. And in the rare moments when you need some more free gigabytes on your hard drive emptying the trash bin will recover them.

But there's a problem here. When you empty it, you lose not only the two-months-old files which you are unlikely to need. You also lose files that were deleted an hour ago and could still be of use. And you get much more space than you actually need at the moment. This should be smarter. How about only deleting the oldest „trash“ to free up some space? This also could happen automatically without user's intervention, similar to what modern mobile OS do about RAM.

Of course I wasn't the first to think about that approach, and there's an implementation even for linux: autotrash. You can automatically run it every day to keep free X gigabytes on your hard drive by deleting the oldest files in the trash. Exactly what I needed!

Artemy Tregubenko,
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