4

Removable drives: Ask to empty the removable drive trash (only that one) when you unmount it

Asking to empty the removable drive trash (only that one) when you unmount it, is really useful for me and the people I know so I will try to explain why we need to add this feature.

A lot of people are not tech savvy and come from Windows. So first, even if I don't want to copy Windows, I just want the most logical and practical behavior, let's see what happen on Windows when you delete a file from a USB stick. The file is definitely removed and the space occupied by the file is cleared, there is no trash for the removable drives.

That said, in my experience, when people switch to Linux on KDE desktop 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. They don't know there is a hidden trash on the device and they expect the same behavior that on Windows. I even saw some people reboot to Windows only to format the USB stick because they don't understand why it's full.

The USB stick are relatively small and can be fulfill rapidly. A lot of people simply press Del instead of Ctrl + Del to remove a file. It's safer and useful because you can retrieve some files after you deleted them but the trash can rapidly take a lot of space.

So it's useful to clear some space by emptying the removable drive trash (only that one) from time to time and now, you have only 2 "bad" solutions to do this. Either you emptying the whole system trash, but you not necessarily want to do this, either you display the hidden files and delete .Trash-1000, but that's not really user friendly.

If you simply ask to empty the removable drive trash (only that one) when you unmount it, it solve the problem new users can face, inform them that there is a trash for the USB drive, it's more user friendly and it allow you to easily empty the removable drive trash only. Some time ago, maybe on Ubuntu 12.04, this behavior was implemented but was removed in later release, maybe due to the fact that Gnome devs remove a lot of features from their softs, I don't know.

I think, like Frank Reininghaus said, this behavior have to be consistent in the system, no matter where you unmount the USB drive, in Dolphin, in the file dialog or in Plasma's device notifier. So it should be implemented in a library, such that it is available everywhere.

It also have to be an option to avoid it to become an annoyance to some users that handle their system differently.

As I'm writing this I'm thinking it can be very useful to also have the different media trashes separated in the file manager to easily empty the one you want. I don't know if it's something that can be easily made but I think it's logical since each media have its own .Trash-1000 folder.

What do you think ?

A prompt every time you unmount a USB pen sounds like it would become very tiresome very quickly, and if you make it optional...what's the point?

We should make it optional but enabled by default. That way, for you and other people that don't need it, you could simply turn it off.

Yes, but not this way.
Cleaning right before the unmounting process is really bad.
when you want to remove that device, you wanna make this quick - so (like with updates) NOBODY will click on "yes, clean it up" when you know that it will take another 2-10minutes (deleting + syncing + unmounting). On top of that, from a usability point of view, this would be so annoying, that many users just pull the stick out, without unmounting it in the first place. so thats not a solution for the problem.

a much better solution:
when you copy some file to the drive, check before the copy-process if thers enough space left on device
if yes -> start
if no -> check if thers enogh space left when the user would clean up the trash-folder
if yes -> ask for cleaning up this folder and start to copy
if no -> prompt a warning that thers no space left on device

in linux + windows mixed environments this would be not a problem, since you can see the trash folders on windows by default. so its easy to remove them from there, if you need to

I'd love to see a solution for this problem. I always usw fix delete because I don't like the trash behavior

plusfabi wrote:Yes, but not this way.
Cleaning right before the unmounting process is really bad.

For sure, that's not the best way. I proposed this because that was the way Ubuntu worked until 12.10 or so and that was good enough. I'm absolutly not against a better way to handle this.

plusfabi wrote:a much better solution:
when you copy some file to the drive, check before the copy-process if thers enough space left on device
if yes -> start
if no -> check if thers enogh space left when the user would clean up the trash-folder
if yes -> ask for cleaning up this folder and start to copy
if no -> prompt a warning that thers no space left on device

in linux + windows mixed environments this would be not a problem, since you can see the trash folders on windows by default. so its easy to remove them from there, if you need to

That looks good

I talked about this on Google+ too (https://plus.google.com/103317747728601 ... BtaR1bbB3w) and there is some +1 votes that shows the interest for this feature.