Recovering an Accidentally Deleted Chapter in Deckle

Deleting the wrong thing happens: the question is just how far along the process you are, since Deckle's reversible Trash system gives you two very different paths back depending on whether it's still in Trash or already gone for good.

What You'll Need

• Nothing, if it's still in Trash. Your most recent backup, if you've already emptied Trash or permanently deleted it.

Step-by-Step

1. Check the Trash section at the bottom of the Binder first. If the chapter is still there, this is the easy case.
2. Click its Restore button to send it back to exactly where it was: same parent folder, same position.
3. If you'd rather it land somewhere else, drag it out of Trash directly onto the spot in the Binder you actually want it, instead of using the Restore button.
4. If you deleted a whole folder by mistake, restoring the folder itself brings back everything nested inside it, in the same structure. You don't need to restore each chapter individually.
5. If it's not in Trash anymore (either permanently deleted or Trash was emptied), it's gone from the live project. Your only path back is a backup: open Settings → Backup, find a dated .zip from before the deletion, extract it, and open the extracted project to recover the chapter from that point in time. See recovering a project from a backup for the full steps.

Common Mistakes

• Emptying Trash as a matter of habit. Since it requires typing "DELETE" to confirm, it's clearly meant to be deliberate, but it's easy to do reflexively once you're used to typing it quickly. Take the extra second to actually check what's in Trash first.
• Assuming a permanently deleted document's images come back with it from a backup. They will, since a backup captures your whole project folder at that point in time, but restoring only the chapter's text through any other means won't recover images that were deleted alongside it, since image files aren't automatically cleaned up or restored as part of the document itself.
• Trying to open a document while it's still in Trash to check if it's the right one. You can't: restore it first if you need to confirm its content, then trash it again if it turns out you didn't need it.
• Forgetting a very recent chapter might not be in any backup yet. If you wrote and then immediately deleted something within the same session, before an automatic backup triggered, a whole-project backup won't have captured it. Trash itself is the only recovery path in that case.