How does the Trash work?

When I show invisible items in my de-crypted Vault (FUSE type), I see a folder called ‘.Trash-1000’ with subfolders ‘files’ and ‘info’. My user account number is 1000, which I assume explains that part of the folder’s name.

  • ‘files’ contains recently-deleted files, but only if they were deleted on my Linux (Debian Buster) machine, not if they were deleted on my MacOS Mojave machine.

  • ‘info’ contains ‘metadata’ text files prefixed with the name of each deleted file, and the original path of the deleted file and its deletion date in the text content.

I don’t understand why this is happening, and I cannot find Cryptomator documentation about it. Is it something that Debian/Nautilus is doing and that MacOS is not doing?

If I want, can I enable this on MacOS?

If I want to save space, how do I delete a file already in ‘.Trash-1000’? I currently have about 1GB of trash in a total vault size of 2GB, so it would be nice to trim it down.

Cryptomator doesn’t provide a trash (yet). What you see there is created by your Linux PC. I.e. it depends on your OS how to manage your trash.

On your Mac you should be able to simply delete the folder to free up space.

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Thanks. An internal ‘Trash’ could be useful, but I would prefer it to work the same way on all platforms.

If there is no way to get the same behavior on MacOS (or Windows), it would be good to have this in Cryptomator itself.

If I delete ‘.Trash’ folder on the Mac, then Linux recreates a new one with the same structure as soon as I delete a new file on the Linux PC.

Anyway, I reduced the raw size of my vault from 2.4 to 1.2 GB. Its not a particular problem storing a vault of that size these days, but I keep multiple dated backups of my encrypted folder on my local drive so I can ‘wind back’ to multiple previous versions in case of accidental deletion etc. Each of the backup directories has a Cryptomator vault entry named after it: if I need access to a file then I mount the drive of the correct wind-back date.

So smaller size enables me to keep more copies for longer.

To empty the trash in some linux distributions, look here: How can I empty the trash?

I want to stress it again that this is completely unrelated to cryptomator and depends on the underlying system.

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