Metspitzer said:
I have mine turned off. I rely on the recycle bin for the rare times
I delete something I shouldn't.
The hitch is that deleting something from a network drive is
permanent. Windows needs as option to warn for network drives.
Um, why would Windows be managing the file deletions on the other host?
When you delete a file in your Windows host, it isn't deleting a file in
its file system. It's issuing a request to delete to the other host and
whatever operating system is running there ... and that may not even be
Windows running over there. A file server could be running any OS as
long as Windows could cooperate with the file interface to it. Could be
Linux on the file server and uses Samba with its support for the SMB
protocol to allow access to its files from a Windows host. Once you're
going over a network, your OS is not involved but instead the
OS-independent protocols that are compatible on each endpoint. Your
host and its OS is talking to another host via a protocol, not your OS
connecting to the other OS. The packets sent across the network's
physical media are not an OS. NetBIOS (in Windows used in sharing with
other Windows hosts) is a protocol (well, its a session level API to
build TCP traffic), not an OS.
How does the OS on your host know how the OS accomplished the requested
delete file action? It could be a different OS on the network host.
Also, imagine how long a file delete would take if the file first had to
be transferred to your host over the network before it could be delete
both at the networked host and on your host so a copy of it would get
saved in your local Recycle Bin. After all, the prompt of which you
speak means that there is a choice to save a copy of the deleted file.
If you configured the network host to eliminate its delete confirmation
prompt but to save deleted files to its local Recycle Bin (or equivalent
in the other OS) then the deleted file would be in its Recycle Bin. How
would the other OS tell your OS to popup a warning prompt based on the
configuration of its Recycle Bin?
When you delete a file, there's no moving of bytes around on your hard
disk. Imagine how long the delete would take to make a copy of the file
in the Recycle Bin's folder before the OS followed with a delete of the
original file. The file system gets updated to reflect where is the
*moved* file where no bytes are moved but the location for the file is
changed in the file system. That's why you have separate Recycle Bins
in each drive, especially since each drive could have a different file
system. How would your OS know how the file system got modified to
reflect a relocation of a file in a different OS? Your OS is not
tracking the file system in another OS. You're not somehow connecting
one OS to another OS. You're letting one OS talk to another OS via a
network protocol.
It sounds like you want a safety interceptor for all file delete
requests that originate on your host regardless to where those delete
requests may go (local or network). Yet what happens if you connect to
the other host using FTP and issued a del or mdel command through FTP?
There was no local file delete event as the command was sent over the
network to the other host that does experience the file delete event.
For SMTP, there is a delete command. When you send commands over a
network protocol to another host, there is no local file delete event.
Because Windows is a general-purpose OS, 3rd parties can write programs
for it: apps, drivers, and even kernel-level interceptors to modify the
system API. Maybe you might something there for something you find
lacking in your personal wants in Windows.
http://www.mangosoft.com/support/medley/technotes/recycle-faq.asp
Never heard of it before today so I haven't a clue if it's what you
want. It looks to be part of their larger enterprise-level Mangomind
product. They don't list prices there and instead have you call them
for a quote. This is typical of many enterprise-level programs and
pretty much means it is very expensive and way out of your financial
reach plus you don't have the enterprise setup where this product is
usable or would make sense. I just used it as an example of a 3rd party
product that might include the functionality you wish were in Windows.
Instead it would be much cheaper to use RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol)
already included in Windows, or [some variant of] VPN, or
TeamViewer/LogMeIn/mikogo to remotely connect to the other host (if it
is running Windows, too) so you could access its Recycle Bin.
If it's a network drive operating as a file server then it should have
backups performed on it daily if not at shorter intervals (to provide
some defined level in granularity for file versioning). You'll have to
ask the admin to restore the file at a particular date/time version from
the backups. Of course, backups are good for your own host, too.
Backups? Why do I suspect that you're now momentarily staring at your
monitor like a deer caught in headlights at night? Yeah, backups.
There is software that you can install that watches for changes in files
and will save just the changes in backups (i.e., incremental backups
triggered by a file modify event, probably flagged by a file close to
detect if there was a change in side or CRC for a file). It does incur
overhead so you want robust hardware for the file server; however, since
it is a file server than it should already use robust hardware to handle
the load from all the connections and file transfers (full or partial).
