I have a site where a regular user can delete records, where what happens is that an IsDeleted flag gets set. On administrative pages, a privileged user can delete records where an actual SQL DELETE permanently discards such records. The difference is important for obvious reasons, and I want to use a consistent term to refer to the one form of deletion vs. the other. I’ve been playing with the words Remove, Delete, Discard and possibly Recycle, and Archive.
My question is: are there standard user-facing terms that distinguish these two behaviors?
5
For regular users they click the Trash icon to flag a record for deleting. The privileged users can then view the contents of the Trash and delete those icons.
Delete is permanent, where as Trash can be thought of as a location.
The user can move records to the Trash.
and
The privileged user deleted records in the Trash.
The other words don’t work well for me.
I don’t like Recycle because it implies a different meaning then simply deleting records.
Archive implies permanent storage, and possibly moving the records to offline storage.
2
One interface I saw had options to Retire (soft-delete) or Delete (actually remove) data from the database.
1
Soft-delete and Hard-delete. I’m sure the difference is obvious enough.
I use:
Delete for soft-delete
Destroy for remove from database