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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?

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    Just a few examples: In IMAP, the terminology is delete (soft delete) vs. expunge (hard delete). In Windows, the terminology is delete (move to recycle bin) vs. permanently delete (remove from recycle bin).
    – Heinzi
    Commented Feb 9, 2013 at 15:55
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    As long as you don't go down the delete, really_delete, really_really_delete road, you should be fine IMO.
    – Hakan Deryal
    Commented Feb 10, 2013 at 7:51
  • @HakanDeryal Isn't really_delete fairly close to permanently delete (from Windows) :-) ?
    – KajMagnus
    Commented Jun 19, 2013 at 21:01
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    Yes, they both sucks.
    – Hakan Deryal
    Commented Jun 22, 2013 at 17:00
  • How about delete vs. purge?
    – tofro
    Commented Feb 15, 2017 at 22:37

4 Answers 4

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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.

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  • Your answer has forced me to reconsider my original question. While @Heinzi's comment better answers the question I thought I was asking, you answered the question I asked more precisely than did he. What I am left contemplating is whether there is a difference between a hard and a soft delete if, from the user's standpoint, neither should be recoverable. Or I could just be overthinking the whole matter.
    – Bob Kaufman
    Commented Feb 11, 2013 at 15:37
  • Well, for me soft delete implies a deletion that involves software, and hard delete implies a deletion that involves hardware. A soft delete of a file would be marking the file as erased in the file system (but the bytes are still there on the hard drive), where as a hard delete would be writing zeros to all the bytes on the hard drive to ensure it can not be recovered. For a database a hard delete would be compacting the database to ensure the old record can not be recovered by an administrator.
    – Reactgular
    Commented Feb 11, 2013 at 16:55
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One interface I saw had options to Retire (soft-delete) or Delete (actually remove) data from the database.

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    That UI Designer clearly never saw the movie "Blade Runner", then.
    – Phill W.
    Commented Jun 22, 2016 at 11:42
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Soft-delete and Hard-delete. I'm sure the difference is obvious enough.

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I use:

Delete for soft-delete

Destroy for remove from database

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