Number Of Files

I've always wondered exactly what is considered a file, but never dwelt on it, as far as those within the OS volume. However, I noticed while defragging the volume containing my movie collection, it states that there are 5,331 files, but the only things in that volume are 1,028 movies, which are 1 file each. Why does the defragger see so many more?

boohbah said:

if you click the properties of the movie folder containing the 1028 movies it will tell you the folder size and the number of files and then the number of folders

Good tip, but most of the extra files has nothing to do with the movies, they are in $RECYCLE.BIN. It contains 3,089 files, and 915 folders. I really don't understand the difference between $RECYCLE.BIN and the Recycle bin, because I emptied the bin and those files remain. What purpose does that serve? Does it's contents really occupy as much space as real files do?

seekermeister said:

boohbah said:

if you click the properties of the movie folder containing the 1028 movies it will tell you the folder size and the number of files and then the number of folders

Good tip, but most of the extra files has nothing to do with the movies, they are in $RECYCLE.BIN. It contains 3,089 files, and 915 folders. I really don't understand the difference between $RECYCLE.BIN and the Recycle bin, because I emptied the bin and those files remain. What purpose does that serve? Does it's contents really occupy as much space as real files do?

Hello!

$RECYCLE.BIN contains a recycle bin for every user on the computer. Have you emptied all Recycle Bins?

In fact, your Desktop Recycle Bin is just a shortcut to a special folder in $RECYCLE.BIN. The format is:

Hidden $RECYCLE.BIN folder, containing folders with a name of the SID of each user on the computer, containing a Desktop.ini file such as the one below to give this SID named folder special Recycle Bin properties:

Code:

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}
LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-8964

Thanks!

Richard

There is only one user on this computer...me, so if I empty the recycle bin on the desktop, shouldn't that empty everything? I ran a defrag to arrange files by name, and the first 4,916,935 clusters are used by $RECYCLE.BIN. If there are 8 bytes of data per cluster, then that would equal 39,335,480 bytes. I'm not sure what that equals in GBs, because the number that I arrived at on the calculator was too large, but regardless, it's a lot of wasted space. I looked at $RECYCLE.BIN, and it contained two files with long numerical names, one of which had a padlock on it. What would happen if I tried to delete both of those?

EDIT: Make that two users....me, the administrator and me, the user.

I just took a random sample by clicking on a number of the blocks on the defragger, and every one that I opened were to the file in $RECYCLE.BIN that I assume belongs to my current account, because the other one has a padlock on it, which I also assume belongs to my other account. Therefore, even though my desktop recycle bin is empty on this account, the $RECYCLE.BIN shows many files in it, some of which has no relationship to anything that this drive/volume is now being used for.

I'm assuming that each since each volume has it's own $RECYCLE.BIN, it would not contain files from other volumes...would it?

A lot of folders have a hidden thumbs.db and desktop.ini file in them. 1,028 movies even if they are only one file could end up being 3084 files counting those hidden ones. Another 1 or 2 system files in each folder and the total gets big real fast. Running disk cleanup before you defrag could help to speed things up.