Configuring HDFS trash

The Hadoop trash feature helps prevent accidental deletion of files and directories.

When you delete a file in HDFS, the file is not immediately expelled from HDFS. Deleted files are first moved to the /user/<username>/.Trash/Current directory, with their original filesystem path being preserved. After a user-configurable period of time (fs.trash.interval), a process known as trash checkpointing renames the Current directory to the current timestamp, that is, /user/<username>/.Trash/<timestamp>. The checkpointing process also checks the rest of the .Trash directory for any existing timestamp directories and removes them from HDFS permanently. You can restore files and directories in the trash simply by moving them to a location outside the .Trash directory.