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[glynor]

So last night I was watching a scary movie with my wife reveling in the season a bit.  The movie we chose was... Well, it wasn't completely lame but it wasn't the best movie of all time (that's for sure)... It was Silent Hill (based on the video game -- I know, video game movies).

So anyway, after it was over, even though it was somewhat entertaining, I was sure that I'd never really want to watch the movie again so I wanted to delete it.  I couldn't reach the mouse from my HTPC (due to sleeping wife on shoulder) but had my remote easily within reach.  I have my remote programmed with all kinds of window-navigating controls, so I can navigate MC's Standard View with some success completely mouse free.

So.... I did the following:

1. I hit the Stop key to stop playback of the movie.  This kicked me back to Playing Now (I have my Options --> General --> Jump on Play set to Playing Now (if has display).  So, when I stopped playback, since I had started it from Standard View in a View Scheme showing all of my movies, it kicked me back to Playing Now.  The Playing Now list showed the list of all of my movies.

2. I wanted to return to the list of movies in the View Scheme, not Playing Now (since deleting the file from Playing Now wouldn't delete the actual file).  So, I hit the "Go Back" button on my remote (which does Alt-Left) which put me back showing the View Scheme of all of my Movies.

3. From there, I hit the Menu key on my remote (the same as the Apps Menu key on the keyboard).  Turns out that MC focuses on the Tree in this case though, so I had to exit the menu (ESC) and then hit the Tab key to focus on the file list.  The file that just finished playing was still showing as highlighted.

4. I hit the Menu key again (which brought up the Right-Click menu) and chose Delete.  Navigated to "Send To Recycle Bin" and hit Enter.

5. MC happily deleted ALL of my files in the view.  Every single one.  Since that was WELL above the 5 GB allowed for the recycle bin on that drive, I actually lost the vast majority of those files (even though most of them were on a local drive).

Now, the reason this happened is that MC had selected ALL of the files in the view (which seems to happen when you double click on a file to Play (all)), but when I returned to the view it looked like only the one file was selected (based on the blue highlight).  This seems to happen sometimes.  I've also seen this behavior a bunch when trying to rotate pictures using the Rotate Left/Right/Invert commands.  The highlight doesn't always update when you "go back" through views.  Sometimes it erroneously shows only one item as selected, until you click on the view with your mouse.  Once you click with the mouse, the view updates and shows everything properly.  However, if you keyboard-only navigate, the highlighting can get messed up!

In this particular case, I had very recently made a full backup of my media drive, so my losses were limited to only 3-4 movies I had recently recorded and converted (which is why I'm being rational and explaining rather than foaming-at-the-mouth).  I have gone ahead an re-enabled the Recycle Bin warning which shows how many files will be deleted.  That's annoying though to have to "double-yes" every time I want to delete a single file.  However, I certainly want it there if MC decides to delete 75 files (or some other large number).

So...

(1) The highlighting doesn't always seem to update properly.

(2) Is there some way that we can change the Recycle Bin warning to only pop up when you are deleting a large number (or perhaps more importantly a large amount in Disk Space since that's what the Recycle Bin cares about).  For example, in Windows if I delete a 20GB file, it pops up a dialog and says "this file is too big to fit in Recycle and will be deleted permanently, are you sure?"  Wouldn't this be more useful than a message that comes up EVERY TIME you want to delete something?

(3) Does anyone know of a good, cheap Undelete program that doesn't stink or cost a bunch?  I hate Norton Utilities, and all the free ones I've tried are immensely annoying.

[JimH]

Sir, had you been drinking at the time?

[glynor]

Sir, had you been drinking at the time?

Of course not.  Not on the Sabbath day.   

[gappie]

thats terrible. had that happen with most of my music, though in that case it was a bug in my brain. i used handy recovery which worked for me. http://www.handyrecovery.com/
but i did not try any other programs, just read somewhere it was a nice program.

good luck.

[glynor]

thats terrible. had that happen with most of my music, though in that case it was a bug in my brain. i used handy recovery which worked for me. http://www.handyrecovery.com/

Nice.  And it worked well?

For $39 I'll probably buy it today if it did for you.  Looks pretty nice at first glance.

As I said... I'm not trying to recover from this deletion (since I have a backup except for 4 or 5 files).  I'm trying to recover from the inevitable deletions in the future where I'm not so lucky.

[neFAST]

(3) Does anyone know of a good, cheap Undelete program that doesn't stink or cost a bunch?  I hate Norton Utilities, and all the free ones I've tried are immensely annoying.

I think most of them are lame when your disk is in NTFS. Did you try recuva?

[gappie]

Nice.  And it worked well?

For $39 I'll probably buy it today if it did for you.  Looks pretty nice at first glance.

As I said... I'm not trying to recover from this deletion (since I have a backup except for 4 or 5 files).  I'm trying to recover from the inevitable deletions in the future where I'm not so lucky.

yes it worked. the only problem i had was that you need a drive to write the recovered files to, which can be a problem when you talk about all music or worse, all movies.

[glynor]

yes it worked. the only problem i had was that you need a drive to write the recovered files to, which can be a problem when you talk about all music or worse, all movies.

Luckily, this is the pile of unused hard drives on my desk at work (and there is a bigger pile, though with lower capacity drives, at home).