Windows 7: Recycle bin is totally useless

All,



This is more of a rant than anything else...

The ENTIRE purpose of the recycle bin is to provide the means to preserve deleted files in case they were accidentally deleted. When this feature was first introduced, it was a major improvement over the previous permanent deletion paradigm.

However, ever several months, my recycle bin get corrupted, and the only way to delete files is to empty the recycle bin. As such, this feature has become a significant liability as I cannot ever expect to recover deleted files.

Yes, I am rather peeved. This is a basic feature of the OS, yet it has failed at least four times over the past 18 months. No, there is no malware on my computer. No, there are no disk problems. No, nothing is reported in the Event Viewer. This is simply a major flaw in a very basic system component. Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

Hello GRoston,

If you had System Protection turned on for the drive where the files were originally at before being deleted, then you might check to see if you may be able to recover any of them with Previous Versions from the original folder that they were in before being deleted.

I've been using Win 7 since it first came out and never had this problem...

Having said that, I found this via Google and maybe it can help you:
Recycle Bin Corrupted - Cannot Delete File or Folder - Vista Forums

hope it helps

David,

The point is that ALL of the fixes posted on-line result in the same thing - the loss of all of the files in the Recycle Bin and none of them address the root cause.

You didn't say you tried ANY or ALL fixes in the OP.
I don't know what "ALL" fixes you tried...

Did you try Brink's suggestion?
I meant to post a link to a SF thread about this issue, not the tutorial...
sorry for my mistake - hope i got the right link this time

Take a look at this SF thread, if you haven't seen it already.
Recycle Bin is corrupt?

Has this persisted through a clean reinstall of the OS? That would be the first thing I'd try if I could never get it to stop corrupting for no apparent reason.

See if RecycleBinEx is something you could use Manage Your Recycle Bin with RecycleBinEx - How-To Geek

FliGi7 - a clean reinstall is completely out of the question. Further, if that is 'the solution', then the product itself is so broken that it should not be used.

Jacee - looks like an interesting product, but the issue is more fundamental. The RB simply decides to corrupt itself every several months.

Completely out of the question for what reasons? What have you done to show that this issue is only due to an inherent fault in the OS and nothing you've done or installed to the machine?

Are you leaving things in the recycle bin a long time?
Such as deleting before Patch Tuesday(s) updates, and then trying to restore much later?
Especially after updates such as SP1...