Trash and restoring items

This article covers the three ways to send something to Trash, how to restore from the Trash popover, the Cmd+Z shortcut, and what happens when you trash a board with items inside it.

Sending an item to Trash

Three paths, pick whichever fits the moment:

• Backspace or Delete key. Click an item to select it, then press Backspace (or Delete). Works for one item or for a multi-select.
• Right-click "Delete". Right-click any item on a board to open the context menu, then pick "Delete". The icon is the trash can.
• From inside a focused item. When a markdown doc, PDF, or image is open in focus mode, the overflow menu in the top right has a "Delete" entry that moves it to Trash without forcing you to close the doc first.

All three paths do the same thing. The item disappears from the board immediately and lands in Trash with a timestamp. Nothing is actually deleted from storage at this point.

Restoring from the Trash popover

Trash lives in the left sidebar, near the bottom. Click it to open the floating Trash panel.

1. 01

   Open Trash from the sidebar

   The Trash row at the bottom of the workspace sidebar opens the floating panel anchored to the right of it. The panel lists every trashed board and card in the workspace, newest deletions first.

2. 02

   Find the item

   The search box at the top filters by title. Useful when Trash has more than a screenful of entries.

3. 03

   Click the restore icon

   The restore icon is on the right side of each row. The item reappears on the board it was deleted from, in its original position, with its custom sort order preserved.

If the popover throws an error on restore, try once more. The most common cause is a stale collab room on the receiving server. Eden falls back to the storage snapshot if the room is stale, so the second attempt almost always lands cleanly.

Cmd+Z for the most-recent delete

If you just deleted something and immediately regretted it, press Cmd+Z (Ctrl+Z on Windows). The item snaps back to its board without opening Trash. The undo works for as long as the delete is the most recent action you took.

Permanently deleting an item

The Trash popover has a second icon next to restore that permanently deletes the item. Clicking it opens a confirmation dialog (Trash is the safety net; once you permanently delete, the item and its storage are scrubbed for good).

Permanently deleting an item:

• Removes the item from Trash.
• Scrubs the underlying storage in S3 (the file, every thumbnail, every sidecar, and every version snapshot under it).
• Cannot be undone, even by support.

The "Empty Trash" button at the footer of the popover does the same thing for every item in Trash, with one confirmation up front.

What happens when you trash a board

A board can contain cards. The cards live inside the board's collab room, not on the parent canvas. When you trash a board, every card inside it gets the same tombstone the board does, and every nested board (and the cards inside those) is tombstoned recursively.

This means:

• Trashing a board with 200 cards hides all 201 entries at once.
• Restoring the board restores every descendant card with it. Cards keep their positions inside the board.
• Permanently deleting the board permanently deletes every descendant.

The Trash popover lists the board itself, not its descendants, so the list stays scannable. If you want to restore a single card from inside a trashed board, restore the board first, then trash the cards you don't want.

Where to go next

• For how Eden snapshots your edits so you can rewind a doc, read version history.
• For how long things stay in Trash before they're permanently reaped, read Trash and version retention.
• If you've already lost something and want a decision tree for getting it back, read recovering a deleted item.