Renaming, Moving and Deleting Files — and the 30-Day Trash

Right-click a file and you get the basics: rename, move to a folder, delete. Rename and move are instant. Delete has a safety net — the Trash — as long as you delete from the website or the app.

Rename

Renaming a file re-encrypts just the filename with your key and updates the record — the file's actual encrypted content is untouched, so renaming a multi-gigabyte video takes the same instant as renaming a text file. Because filenames are encrypted the same way file contents are, a rename never passes a readable name through the server; it goes straight from encrypted-old to encrypted-new.

Move

Moving a file into a different folder — via the right-click menu, drag-and-drop, or as a bulk action across many files at once — only changes which folder the file record points to. Nothing about the file is re-uploaded or re-encrypted; it's a metadata update, so moving works the same regardless of file size.

Delete — the 30-day Trash

When you delete a file or a folder from the website or the app, it isn't erased: it moves to the Trash, in the sidebar. It stays there for 30 days, then it is deleted forever automatically, during the night. Deleting a folder moves everything inside it together, as a single item in the Trash — and restoring it brings everything back together.

From the Trash you can:

• Restore an item. It goes back to the folder it came from. If that folder no longer exists, it goes back to the main folder; if an item with the same name is already there, the restored one gets a suffix, so nothing is overwritten.
• Delete forever a single item, straight away.
• Empty the trash, deleting everything in it forever in one go.

Each item shows how many days are left before it is deleted for good.

While something is in the Trash

• It still takes up space in your plan. Emptying the trash, or deleting single items forever, frees that space.
• Its shared links don't work. If you restore it, everything goes back as it was, links included.
• It stays end-to-end encrypted. Moving something to the Trash doesn't decrypt or copy it: the same encrypted file simply waits there.
• Its version history goes with it. Restore the file and its previous versions come back too.

Deleting over WebDAV is permanent

The Trash covers deletions made from the website and the app. When a WebDAV client — Windows Explorer, macOS Finder, rclone, a NAS backup job — deletes a file or a folder, it is deleted forever straight away and does not go through the Trash. Sync and backup tools delete and rewrite files all the time, and sending all of that to the Trash would fill it, and your space, with copies nobody asked for.

So be careful with commands that delete on the remote side: rclone sync, for example, makes the destination match the source and removes whatever isn't in the source. Try it first with --dry-run. Overwriting a file over WebDAV is different: the previous content is kept as a version (the last 3, for 30 days) — see WebDAV troubleshooting.

Habits that still help

• Sort by date or size before a cleanup pass, so you can see exactly what you're about to remove.
• Read the confirmation dialog's item count before confirming a bulk delete, particularly after a select-all.
• Look through the Trash before emptying it: emptying can't be undone.

If you're storing anything genuinely irreplaceable, this is also a good moment to revisit the 3-2-1 backup strategy — no single copy, encrypted or not, should be the only copy of something that matters.