File operations and undo
Copy, move, compress, checksums and the safety rails that protect your data.
WingDrive has the full toolbox you expect from a file manager, and it is careful with your data.
The toolbox
- Copy To and Move To any location, volume or paired device.
- Compress and extract archives from the context menu.
- Templates: create new files from your templates folder.
- Dolphin service menus: your existing KDE service menus show up in the context menu.
- Open With, including desktop entries with field codes such as
%fand%u. - Permissions and SHA-256 checksums from the Inspector.
Undo
Copy, overwrite, cross-volume move and trash are journaled. Press Ctrl+Z in the desktop app, or run wing file undo, to reverse the last one. wing file history lists what can still be undone.
- A file that a copy replaces is kept for 7 days in a hidden
.wing-undo-*folder next to it. - Undo skips anything that changed since the operation, so it never overwrites newer work.
- The journal lives in each library’s job database and is never synced.
Safety rails
- Copy preflight checks free space and conflicts before anything is written.
- Atomic copies: files are written under a temporary name and renamed into place. A cancelled or failed copy leaves no truncated file behind and never destroys the file it was replacing.
- No copies into themselves: a folder can’t be copied into its own subtree.
- Timestamps of files and folders are preserved.
- Symbolic links are copied, moved and renamed as links.
- Secure delete refuses copy-on-write filesystems (btrfs, ZFS, APFS, ReFS, bcachefs), where overwriting in place can’t be guaranteed.
- System mounts are never ejected.
Jobs
Long operations run as jobs that report progress, can be paused and cancelled, and resume after a restart. Watch them in the job manager or with wing job monitor.