OS 9 had it, and Windows has always had it: the ability to select an item from the Trash, and restore it to its original location – wherever it was you originally deleted it from.
But for some reason, Apple dropped this incredibly useful functionality (along with window shades). Instead, you can only grab things out of the trash and move them manually to some other location. If you can’t remember where something was before you deleted it, you’re out of luck.
Good news: Reports are coming in that the next Mac OS version, 10.6 or “Snow Leopard,” will have a “put back” feature. This is really important for scenarios where a file you delete, accidentally or otherwise, needs to go right back to the exact same location where it started out.
The inability to do this has led a lot of users, myself included, to come up with clunky workarounds. For example, if I’m removing an application and its preference files, I end up creating a new folder on my desktop and re-creating the entire subdirectory scheme, moving elements manually into their appropriate folders. That way, I can delete the folder, knowing that if I drag the folder out of my trash back to my desktop at some point, I can figure out how to put things back together again.
If this feature makes it into Snow Leopard, that will be good news indeed – I can simply select a file in the trash, and click “restore” or “put back” or whatever Apple decides to call it, and have the file go back from whence it came.
Isn’t it stupid that this “feature” hasn’t been there all along?
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