I have added to the context menu a Delete command that bypasses the trash. I don’t use it often, but some stuff I know I want deleted, and I keep my trash can neatly stored in a drawer on the panel because I don’t like clutter on my Desktop, so emptying it means a couple of extra clicks. I know that once I’ve burnt that LiveCD of KDE 4, I don’t need the ISO again, so I just delete it rather than sending it to the trash where it can languish for a month until it occurs to me to empty the trash.

I was organising photos on the FAT32 partition of my storage drive today because I haven’t been taking many pictures and really haven’t paid too much attention to them, so I had January and February photos together. I created a January directory, cut all of the January photos from the temp directory (where I keep photos during the month they were taken), and pasted them in. I accidentally copied the picasa.ini file, which is just a little text file that contains information about the photos’ location. Since I’d moved them, it wouldn’t be valid anymore; I always toss the ini in the trash and Picasa creates a new one the next time it scans for changes.

I may be over the worst of the flu, but I still have a terrible cough. The “Delete” command is right below the “Move to trash” command, and just as I right clicked the picasa.ini file, I started coughing and accidentally dragged the pointer down to Delete. No big deal because the ini file isn’t important anyway, but since I’d just cut and pasted the January photos, they were still selected. Uh-oh.

The partition the photos are on is used only for storage; it’s a 250 GB drive, divided into three partitions. I made one FAT32 because I did it before NTFS write access was reliable in Linux (it is now with ntfs-3g), and since it’s only for photos and music, the 4GB size limit for a single file doesn’t matter. Anyway, since it’s only storage, I just didn’t do anything to it after I realised I’d deleted the goddamned pictures, and I installed PhotoRec, which is currently running an undelete. I told it to scan the whole partition and recover everything rather than (faster) just scanning the unused space; I’d rather have it take longer and find files I don’t want than to have it take less time and not find January’s files. I can re-delete stuff I don’t want. Nothing I shot in January was really wonderful, but they’re my pictures, and besides, I’ve always wanted to see how PhotoRec works because I’ve heard a lot about it but never had occasion to use it. So far it has found 1676 jpg files, 233 mp3 files, 68 text files, 46 gif, 46 psd, 21 png, 8 zip, 6 doc, 5 asf, 5 pdf and 8 “other”. Oh well….better to find too many than too few! 😉

EDIT: Changed my mind after actually reading the instructions for PhotoRec….hehe. Scanning now only for jpg files, and only unallocated space, since that tells it to look only for deleted files, not attempt to recover corrupted files. This should take much less time. 🙂

EDIT AGAIN: Perfect! Took just a couple of minutes to find my 166 deleted photos, and even sorted them by time and date, so to rename them, all I had to do was find the beginning and end of the group of shots from a particular day, and rename them from there. They’re all comfortably ensconced in the January directory, and my February shots are in the temp folder where they’ll stay until the end of the month. Yay for PhotoRec!!