Protect Your Files by Adding a Recycle Bin to Your Flash Drives
You certainly wouldn't walk a high wire without a safety net, so why do you store important files on a flash drive, which is one accidental deletion from oblivion? Flash drives have no Recycle Bin, so the Delete key is permanent for anything you store there. Well, it used to be: I've found a simple utility that gives you the security of a Recycle Bin on your flash drives, with a few caveats.
iBin adds a Recycle Bin to your flash drive. Just copy iBin to your flash drive and run the program -- it'll perform a few housekeeping steps (which is virtually instant if your flash drive is empty, or might take a few minutes if you have a lot of files on the device). Then it's ready to rock and roll. When you press the Delete key on a file in your flash drive, you'll see this dialog box:
You can delete the file or send it to the iBin folder, which is your device's new Recycle Bin. If you'd rather just delete the file outright, press Win+Delete instead. iBin comes with a nice set of options for customizing your new Recycle Bin -- all the sorts of things you'd expect, including how large the bin can get, when (and if) to automatically purge the bin, and how to deal with restoring duplicate files.
Unfortunately, iBin isn't perfect. To get iBin's protection, you need to run the program on every PC into which you insert the flash drive. And when you remove the flash drive and later re-insert it, you need to run the program again. That's a lot to remember, so this program seems best to me for situations in which you tend to just leave it in the same PC all the time.
While we're on the subject, don't miss Rick's recent post, Use a Flash Drive to Rescue a Malware-Infested PC.