A concern many have with the integrity of cloud data is the ability to easily recover deleted files. Microsoft’s SkyDrive recently added a new feature to make it easier for customers to retrieve deleted files, as reported
on the Inside SkyDrive blog:
SkyDrive already keeps previous versions of your Office documents automatically. But students, in particular, have asked for a way to recover any file—even those deleted by accident, by someone else, during a group project. So, we’ve added a recycle bin to SkyDrive.
I’m going to start by showing you how we’ve made deleting files better. Prior to this release, when you deleted anything in SkyDrive you had to acknowledge and dismiss a warning dialog. This extra step got in the way of making delete as fast as it should be. Now, when you delete an item, we simply tell you that we did it and allow you to “undo” your action:
We think this will make deleting even faster and easier. However, if you have deleted something already, from any SkyDrive app, we’re now giving you a recycle bin that will work very similarly to what you’re used to on your PC. You can get to the recycle bin from a link in the bottom left side of SkyDrive.
From there you can browse your recycle bin in thumbnail or details view.
It’s easy to select items to restore back to their original location, as well as see when the item was deleted. And file and folder selection works just like it does in the rest of SkyDrive.
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).
Right now, the recycle bin feature is available from SkyDrive.com, and over time we expect the recycle bin experience to make its way to other SkyDrive experiences too.