Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Recycle Bin heads to SkyDrive

Yesterday there was an announcement that the Recycle Bin was coming, and that it was being rolled out and should appear in your account in the next 24 hours.

Today, I am going to give you an in depth look of the new Recycle Bin feature. If you have not seen it in your account yet, then you must be really late getting it, as every user should now have the Recycle Bin.


About
The Recycle Bin feature in SkyDrive acts just like the Recycle Bin on your Windows machine. When you delete files, those files will instead be moved to the Recycle Bin. I'll go ahead and tell you upfront that the Recycle Bin does not count against your SkyDrive storage. I'll tell more specific Recycle Bin features in a later section in an article.

Location
The Recycle Bin feaure is located at the bottem left of the menu pane, which is different from what the leak of the feature previously said it will be located. I have highlighted the Recycle Bin link. Clicking that link brings you to the Recycle Bin page. There is a picture of it below. Like I said before, info later in the article. Click the image to view it larger

Details
Right now, the Recycle Bin feature is only available for SkyDrive.com. The SkyDrive team states that the Recycle Bin feaure will be coming to other apps as well. One of the first things the SkyDrive team has done is make deleting files faster and easier. Previously, you got a confirmation dialog when you deleted something. To make the process of deletion faster, SkyDrive now deletes your files and it includes an undo button. Refer to the example image.

If you accidently deleted something, or want to restore something, you can tick the boxes of what you want and then you can restore those files back to their origional locations. You can of course select everything and permanently delete items from the Recycle Bin.
As stated before, items in the Recycle Bin will not take up space from your SkyDrive. Items in the Recycle Bin also won't last forever. Here is some text from the blog post explaining what I just said, but officialy and in more detail.
Items in the recycle bin do not count against your SkyDrive storage limit. We save all items you delete in the recycle bin for at least 3 days. If the content in your recycle bin gets large enough to exceed 10% of your storage limit (which will be pretty rare), we’ll start to delete the oldest content (after it’s been there 3 days), and will permanently remove items from the recycle bin after they have been there for 30 days (and not restored).
Hope you enjoyed this brief in depth look of the new Recycle Bin on the new SkyDrive. Let me know of your questions and comments below.