TrashMagic is a protection tool for the Trash contents, running natively on PowerPC and Intel Macs. TrashMagic automatically backup the contents of the Trash, so that you can recover any file accidentally deleted when you empty the Trash. TrashMagic contains a protection engine that runs permanently and copy any file you moved to the Trash into a specific cache. At any time, even days or weeks after you have emptied the Trash, you can recover deleted files that were protected by TrashMagic.

Features:

Protect the contents of the Trash
• When you empty the Trash, its whole contents is lost for ever. Install TrashMagic, and you'll be able to recover your data lost after an error, or files that you deleted, even days or weeks after they were deleted.• With its recover and auto-empty features, TrashMagic makes your Trash a Smart Trash.

How it works?
• As soon as you move a file to the Trash, TrashMagic keeps a copy of it. To protect your Trash, install TrashMagic and activate the protection. If a file is lost when you empty the Trash, open TrashMagic and drag and drop the file back to the Finder.

Automatically empty the Trash
• TrashMagic can automatically empty the Trash for you. With this option, TrashMagic copies any data that is moved to the Trash and empty the Trash. You can maintain a Trash that is always empty, while your data are secured and can be restore at any time (within the safekeeping period you defined).

What compared to a backup tool or Time Machine?
• TrashMagic keeps a copy immediately, while Time Machine executes a backup every hour. Any data you receive or modify, and delete between two backups are not saved. Items that are excluded from the backups are also not saved.
• TrashMagic can recover these data.

Author's Note: You can not recover the data that you have thrown in the Trash if TrashMagic was not installed before you emptied the Trash and deleted the data.

Limitations: Fully working demo. Data are saved, but you must recover within 5 minutes after they have been trashed (that's the limitation of the demo version). Install the demo and have your Trash protected, and purchase a licence only if you need to recover files deleted more than 5 minutes ago!

Requirements:
OS X 10.6+
Intel Required

Also available is:
Universal Binary version 1.2.1 for OS X 10.5