Deleting a note in Myne is a two-stage process: first it goes to the Trash, where you can get it back, and only emptying the Trash removes it for good. This article covers both stages and what “for good” actually means.
Deleting a note
When you delete a note, it moves to the Trash and disappears from the sidebar. An undo appears immediately so you can put it straight back if you didn’t mean it. Deleting a folder that still contains notes asks you to confirm first, then moves the whole subtree to the Trash together.
Notes in the Trash and notes marked as templates are hidden from the sidebar and never appear in search results.
Getting a note back
Open the Trash to see what’s in it; each note is listed with how long ago it was trashed. Restore returns a note to the folder it came from, exactly where it was. Nothing in the Trash expires on its own: notes stay there until you remove them yourself. That is deliberate: the Trash is a safety net you control, not a timer.
Trash versus Archive
The Trash is no longer the only way to set a note aside. Archiving is the other: it hides a note from the sidebar without putting it on the path to deletion. The two differ in what they do to a note:
- Trash hides the note from the sidebar and from search, and a trashed note does not resolve as a wikilink target. Trash is the route to permanent deletion: a single note removed from the Trash, or Empty trash, erases it for good.
- Archive hides the note from the sidebar but keeps it in search results and resolvable as a wikilink target. Archive has no automatic purge and no equivalent of Empty trash — nothing in the Archive is ever on a path to deletion.
A note holds at most one of these markers at a time: archiving a note clears its trashed marker, and trashing an archived note clears its archived marker. So a note is either live, archived, or in the Trash — never two at once.
Permanent deletion
Removing a note from the Trash, the opposite of Restore, is the only irreversible step. You can delete a single note permanently, or use Empty trash to clear everything at once (Myne shows a count and asks you to confirm, because this cannot be undone).
When a note is permanently deleted, its encrypted file is removed, and with it the only on-disk copy of the key that note was encrypted under, so the content is not just unlinked, it becomes unrecoverable. The note’s snapshots are removed in the same step. After this, the recovery phrase cannot bring the note back, because there is nothing left to decrypt.
Limits
Permanent deletion is final within the vault, but a backup made before you deleted a note still contains it, and restoring that backup brings the note back. Deletion erases the live vault, not copies you have already exported. Plan deletions and backups with that in mind.