Lesson 3.7: Workspace hygiene — soft vs hard deletion

Difficulty: Beginner | Duration: 8 min | Prerequisites: Lesson 3.1

Overview

Workspaces accumulate — per-project recordings, environments, collections, flows. Bowire gives deletion two postures so an operator can clean up without fear of losing the wrong thing.

The two postures

Posture What happens Recoverable?
Soft delete The workspace (and its scoped state) moves to Trash; it disappears from the picker but stays on disk for the retention window. Yes — restore from Trash, or Undo right after.
Hard delete A cascade purge — the workspace and every artefact scoped to it (recordings, environments, collections, flows, plugin installs) are removed for good. No.

Soft is the default, reversible path; hard is the deliberate, irreversible one. The Action Log records the deletion so Ctrl/Cmd+Z (and the Activity drawer) can surface the inverse even after the toast's Undo affordance expires.

Operating it

  • From the workbench: Settings → Workspace exposes the Soft/Hard toggle, the Trash list, and restore.
  • From disk: soft-deleted workspaces linger under the Trash area of ~/.bowire/workspaces/; a hard delete removes the <id>/ tree entirely. Back up (see Lesson 3.6) before a hard delete you're unsure about.

Key Takeaways

  1. Soft delete → Trash (recoverable, with Undo); hard delete → cascade purge (permanent).
  2. Deletions are logged — undoable via Ctrl/Cmd+Z and the Activity drawer, not just the toast.
  3. Back up before a hard delete — the cascade takes every scoped artefact with it.

What's Next

That closes the CLI & operations unit. Where you head next depends on your course — embedding (Unit 4) or extending (Unit 5). See Learning Paths.

Reference