Microsoft Adds Recycle Bin Feature to SkyDrive

In a post to the Inside SkyDrive blog today, Microsoft revealed more changes to its ever-improving SkyDrive cloud storage service. On tap this week: a new Recycle Bin feature that will enable users to recover files they’ve deleted, inadvertently or not.

This feature should answer one of the few lingering complaints about SkyDrive, that the service doesn’t (well, didn’t) have any recovery functionality. As I noted in SkyDrive Tip: Recover Deleted Or Modified Files, however, those who access SkyDrive via Explorer and the SkyDrive application in Windows 8 already have a built-in solution to this problem.

“SkyDrive already keeps previous versions of your Office documents automatically,” Microsoft’s Omar Shahine notes in the post. “But students, in particular, have asked for a way to recover any file—even those deleted by accident, by someone else, during a group project. So, we’ve added a recycle bin to SkyDrive.”

Microsoft says that the Recycle Bin will appear in users’ SkyDrive (web interface) over the next 24 hours. I don’t have it yet—you can tell by whether a link for Recycle Bin appears before Manage Storage in the lower left corner of the site—so I have to go off of Microsoft’s description for now.

A few things are changing with the addition of the Recycle Bin. First, you’re no longer warned that the deletion will be permanent. Instead, the selected file will simply be deleted and an Undo button will appear in the Deleting pop-up. Second, you can use that Recycle Bin link to view the files in there and recover any that you may still need.

A few more points about this feature:

Good stuff. SkyDrive just keeps getting better.