Win7 - Recycle bin completely useless

All,

Just a general commentary: The purpose of the Recycle Bin is to provide a 'purgatory' for deleted files. This way, if something is accidentally deleted, it can be recovered. However, given the regularity with which the Recycle Bin gets corrupted (seems to happen two to three times per year) - which forces one to empty its contents entirely -any utility provided by the Recycle Bin is completely nullified.

Is there a non-MS recycle bin-like utility that one can use, preferably disabling the useless one provided by MS and replacing it entirely?

I've not heard of Recycle Bin becoming corrupted before. What exactly happens?

Run System File Checker to check your OS integrity. SFC -SCANNOW Command

The problem is not a disk error (scannow) nor was it full (probably had 100-200 MB of stuff). Some have reported that deleting an item with an overly long file name can cause this problem.

System File Checker does not scan for disk errors. It checks the integrity of the OS files.

Are you able to describe the problem as you haven't yet?

Sorry - this is a well known issue. After months of the Recycle Bin's working properly, today I tried to delete a file and a window popped up with the message:

The Recycle Bin on C:\ is Corrupted. Do you want to empty the Recycle Bin for this drive? YES or NO

The only way to resolve the problem is to click YES (or take equivalent action via an elevated privilege command prompt) which results in the contents of the Recycle Bin's being deleted.

Also, the response "If something is in it for over a few days, does it really need to be? It is supposed to be "emptied" on occasion." is not at all helpful.

Just use Backup and then you can disable the Recycle Bin. Just select "remove files immediately".

As Britton30 suggested earlier, you might be better off creating a separate folder for your "discarded" files (let's not call them deleted for now. :)) According to Microsoft there's really no practical limit on the combined sizes of all the files in a folder, though there may be limits on the number of files in a folder. And, there are limits on individual file size that depend on what file system you're using on your hard disk.

What is the maximum number of files I can place into one sub-folder in - Microsoft Answers

But for your purposes you could create as many "discard" folders as you like as each one fills up. This would give you even more flexibility. Create 12 folders for each month of the year. Delete individual contents on an as needed basis. Archive them. Be able to do a lot more than what the Recycle Bin offers. Just a thought.