Where does a deleted item go? iOs or Mac

This morning, before having an adequate amount of coffee, I deleted an action on my iPad. Where do I go to retrieve it? I don’t see it on my Mac, either.
From now on, I promise to consume an adequate amount of coffee before opening Omnifocus.

Thanks!
Brad

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Deleted items, unlike items that are dropped or filtered by your view settings, are removed from your database altogether. If you need to recover them, your best recourse is likely the automatic backups that OmniFocus takes on your Mac.

Under the File menu, choose “Show Backups…” then take a look through your backups for the most recent database that will still contain the item. You can open that backup separately from your main database simply by double-clicking the file. Once it’s open in a new window, copy and paste the deleted item back into your current data.

For more details, see the section “Getting specific actions from a backup” in the Reverting to an OmniFocus Database Backup support article, or send our support team an email.

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Can I add this as a feature request? Like having a “trash can” that can be emptied and maybe is auto-emptied every week? I know this adds some complication, but I think it’s too easy to accidentally delete an item and it be nowhere to be found after that.

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wouldn’t it be a good idea to simply get into the habit of ‘dropping’ items rather than deleting them in the first instance. then only deleting items that you know for sure (post coffee) that you really don’t need anymore.

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You can always submit bug reports or feature requests. Email is the official way for that, and you can find the address under OmniFocus menu (Help>Contact Omni).

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I cannot agree more. At some point the delete button was pressed. I only realized it when I couldn’t find any of the 170 tasks in the project I was working on. 130 were ‘recovered’.

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Don’t forget OmniFocus makes local backups regularly, a couple of times a day at least

~/Library/Containers/com.omnigroup.OmniFocus2/Data/Library/Application Support/OmniFocus/Backups

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So … I just accidentally deleted an entire project planning. A lot has changed since the last backup. No undo and and no trash bin!!!

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I just ran into this . I clicked on new task and started typing. I made a typo and hit the delete key several times to delete my mistake, except it deleted tasks instead of the text! These deleted tasks were only a few minutes old ( I’m adding a bunch of new tasks at once ) , so I doubt there is a backup.

Yeah, a trash can sounds like the way to go!.

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Sent feature request to omnifocus@omnigroup.com. Please consider sending feature request to raise the priority of this.

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+1 this . I accidentally put an action group inside of an project, I wanted to remove the action group but keep the contained tasks.Instead, it deleted the action group and the tasks. a “Trash can” buck like Evernote, macOS, email programs ( deleted items in Outlook ) and others apps have would be great.

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Undo will bring back deleted tasks and projects, if you notice your mistake while it’s still on your Undo stack. (If I’ve made other changes since the mistake that I don’t want to lose, I will sometimes Undo many times, grab some earlier state with Copy, then Redo to get back to where I started before using Paste to bring back that earlier state.)

If you’re using a single device, the Undo stack is quite large: it’s only limited by your device’s memory. When you sync changes from another device, the local device’s undo stack gets reset since it doesn’t understand how to undo past another device’s changes.

As noted above, projects that have been around for at least a day will also be stored in OmniFocus’ automatic daily backups.

All that said, we agree that a “trash” for recently deleted items would be a useful feature.

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Thanks for the reply! Undo is indeed very powerful. But the opaqueness of what I’m undoing makes it less helpful. Add to that, sometimes I don’t realize that I’ve accidentally deleted something until said Undo history has cleared.

Also since sync happens so often nowadays between devices — doesn’t that render the undo history even less helpful?

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Undo should select the item it changed, which helps somewhat with its opaqueness.

But yes, all this was designed in v1.0 while OmniFocus was still a single-device app without any support for syncing—so, as noted above, we agree that a trash would be a great feature to add. (It’s on our list; we’ve just been very busy working on the many other things on that list! Fortunately, that list will get a lot shorter when we ship OmniFocus 3 this coming year.)

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I forgot about Undo as I haven’t needed it in a great while. It’s usually when I do something that I don’t understand , like move a project into a project and then try to remove the newly minted action group while keepings it’s tasks.

I was going for a “merge projects” action that I don’t think exists :).

Now that I think about it, I agree that implementing an Trash can for all of the different object types in Omnifocus. As in my example. Say you delete an action group from a project and then the parent project. If both are in the Trash can be undeleted individually, What happen if you undelete just the action group? Do it become a project ? Is it’s parent project also undeleted?

And what about undeleting the project? Should it have or not have the action group?

Keep up the good work and I look forward to OF 3.

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I didn’t realize it selected the item that was changed — not sure if that’s a recent change, but thanks!

The flip side of this just happened to me :( I needed to undo something and right when I was about to undo — a sync finished and my undo history was cleared

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Ouch, sorry to hear that. It’s actually technically possible to review and reverse any changes made throughout your current sync history (which includes any changes within the last hour, as well as any changes not yet synced to all your devices), but we haven’t figured out how to put a good user experience on that yet so right now it involves working directly with your database transaction files.

If you ever need help recovering something like that, I recommend making a quick backup and then contacting our support humans who can walk you through the process of locating and reversing that change.

(As for potential ways of exposing this to the user: it might be weird to have Undo suddenly start undoing individual changes synced from other devices; from your device’s point of view it might make the most sense to have the entire sync operation show up as a single Undo, since those changes landed all at once from your device’s perspective. Of course, those changes were applied out of time—some of the synced changes may have been applied to your database before your local edits—so reversing that is somewhat complicated. What might be even cooler and more useful would be to show you a timeline listing each of your recent changes, letting you view your database at that point and selecting which changes you’d like to keep. That capability is present in the underlying data/sync model, but it would be a lot of work to bring that capability up to the user interface—work that would be interesting to do, but might not be as useful to the app’s core purpose as, say, letting you reorder tasks in Forecast.)

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Dear Ken I am very happy to see that you contributed to this issue and said that you also think that a trash for Omnifocus would be a great feature to add and that it is on your list! I just wanted to say that there are many discussions here among the users regarding this issue. This feature would cure many headaches and maybe could also reduce the support tickets, because of lost data etc. I hope that it can get realized in a way some day.

I summed up all the threads regarding this issue.

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