57gb in external's hidden Recycle Bin?

[gregrocker]

57gb in external's hidden Recycle Bin!

I had forgotten every drive has a hidden Recycle Bin. Today I was scanning with Malwarebytes and notice it taking a long time on J:Recycle Bin.

Unhid System Files and there it was in External root with 57gb in it!

Guess I just assumed deleting External drive files puts them in desktop's Recycle Bin.

What would routinely empty this hidden bin or how would anyone even know to do so? Can it eventually take up all the External HD space? Most people don't run Disk Cleanup on Externals, do they?

Just askin. Maybe this will helps others. Thanks.

 

[derekimo]

Actually that one baffled me for a while, I was trying to figure out where all that missing space was. It was in the hidden recycle bin. I'm curious to know what would empty this too.

 

[Brink]

When you have the external drive connected, I would think that Disk Cleanup would clear it. CCleaner should be able to as well.

If all else fails, you could use the tutorial below to delete the $Recycle.bin file for the external drive to clear and reset it.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/131294-recycle-bin-corrupted-cannot-delete-file-folder.htmlhttp://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/66294-recycle-bin.html

 

[macgyver2]

I use 3 USB hard drives and always empty the recycle bin as they call it when I delete a lot of files off one of them. Never noticed deleted files sticking around like that either. Most of my drives I have set to not allow the trash files to get larger then 4 gigs that way I don't have to worry about a bloated trash file.

 

[gregrocker]

I dont' keep it plugged in so CCleaner really hasn't had a shot at it. I run CCleaner when I defrag and I don't defrag the External based on what I've read.

How do I set a size limit on hidden Recycle Bins?

Guess I'd better check for one on my stick. (Nope, none there).

 

[kituhi1234]

may be this VB script shuld help... its used to change the limits of recycle bin...

 

[TVeblen]

I do as Brink suggested. Hook up the external and run Disk Cleanup.

I discovered that this was necessary because the external I use for disk images for 4 computers was being reported as full in Acronis (boot from CD), but in Windows it showed hundreds of GB free. After some serious head scratching....

 

[SledgeDG]

Either I must be missing something here or it's a x64 issue. Here (W7 Ultimate x86) I have 2 USB drives permanently hooked up and their Recycling folder gets emptied automatically, whenever I empty the one on Desktop. Also the custom settings I reached through the properties of the desktop recycle bin.
Perhaps I'm just lucky

-DG

 

[gregrocker]

When I click on the External HD single hidden $RECYCLE.BIN, it opens a folder with two Recycle Bins both of which have a default setting limiting size. Strange how this limit apparently didn't work before, and stranger still why there are two Recycle Bins with exact same settings/location:

 

[SledgeDG]

Curious...I just found out, that on my external 2TB drive I also have 2 Recycling bins.
Only the one which is on top on your picture (the one with the lock) is inside the other one
While on the 1TB external drive the folder with the lock is non existent.
Don't ask me why...since it's the older drive, it's certainly possible that I delete the whole thing at one point.

-DG

 

[Dwarf]

What I would like to know is this: I have deleted all my icons off the desktop and binned them. Now, I can understand why they appear in the recycle bin on my computer itself, but why should they appear in the bin on my external drive? Surely, it would make sense for the bin contents to reflect what has been placed in there directly, in other words the bin on a particular drive should only contain files that have been deleted from that particular drive.

 

[SledgeDG]

Dwarf: bear with me, I might have worded s/th wrong. I didn't mean to imply that files deleted from your desktop are copied into the recycling bin of your external drive. In fact it shows there only as some form of shortcut (the properties say Origin: Desktop) which leads me to believe that the whole rescue bin structure is somehow connected via junctions/similar constructs.(As I understand it, it's much like symbolic links under Unix)

[URL=http://img525.imageshack.us/i/capturezg.png/]

[/URL]

-DG
​

 

[Dwarf]

That would appear to be the case. I have just emptied the bin on my external drive (I only had a single object in it that originated on the external drive) and everything in it was deleted, irrespective of which drive the object originated from.

 

[Barman58]

When I click on the External HD single hidden $RECYCLE.BIN, it opens a folder with two Recycle Bins both of which have a default setting limiting size. Strange how this limit apparently didn't work before, and stranger still why there are two Recycle Bins with exact same settings/location:

Greg,

Do you access this drive from two systems by any chance? if you do then two identical $recycle bins would make some sort of sense.

 

[gregrocker]

Nigel I think you've got it: Both bins in the sub-folder are dated/timestamped when I was plugging external into separate computers.

Any ideas as to why the default size limit wasn't enforced?

 

[Barman58]

Nigel, I think you've got it. Both bins in the sub-folder are dated/timestamped when I was plugging external into separate computers.

Any ideas as to why the default size limit wasn't enforced?

Not really unless some software you were using did something it shouldn't - I have to assume that the system should be designed to have multiple recycle bins - on a portable drive anyway, but perhaps it's an undisclosed feature caused by the multiple bins .

would be interesting to see how internal drives are treated on systems, when accessed by two operating systems - I seem to remember seeing multiple nested recycle bins on data drives when I had multiple OS's running during the Beta program

 

[thehappyman]

If All Else Fails

What I would like to know is this: I have deleted all my icons off the desktop and binned them. Now, I can understand why they appear in the recycle bin on my computer itself, but why should they appear in the bin on my external drive? Surely, it would make sense for the bin contents to reflect what has been placed in there directly, in other words the bin on a particular drive should only contain files that have been deleted from that particular drive.

If you cant find ANY other way to get rid of the junk in this recycle bin, copy all the data on that disk to another drive (cant take that long), REFORMAT the offending drive, then move the data back again.