Recycle Bin

[huffman]

I am running Windows 7, 64 bit. I ran what was supposed to be a free version of CleanMyPC. It was NOT free and so never activated it, therefore it was limited as to what it would do.

At any rate, after the scan, it said that my Recycle Bin had 8.47gb of files. I double checked and when I tried to empty the Recycle bin, it indicated it was empty.

Is this even possible. Reason I am asking because my C-drive says it is full.

Any info would be helpful. Thank you.

 

[Megahertz07]

There can be a lot of trash on the temp folders, updates already installed etc.
Use free CCleaner to clean your computer. CCleaner - Standard

Once installed, go to Options - Settings and un mark everything.
Then run the Cleaner - Windows tab

 

[Acova]

An interesting moment:

My Recycle Bin is also empty, but it seems that it still takes up ~180 MB via Disk Cleanup's report. (disk clean up scans first, then awaits for any command to clean or not, one must be careful if using Disk Cleanup to free up space, best to read more before completing a clean up with this method)

Also, when I attempted to enter path: C:\$Recycle.Bin
Via properties it did show me that there are around 77 files and 3 folders, but there was no file, not even the hidden ones.
I made a test such as putting in recycle bin another file, the amount of files raised to 78 in C:\$Recycle.Bin .
Emptied my R.Bin and the count decreased by 1, back to 77.

Puzzles me if it left out some files in some place now.
Guess it is not critical for me to let it be this way for now, but just in case if someone needs, I did look up an extra thread that might be of help (by Brink):

Recycle Bin Corrupted - Cannot Delete File or Folder

 

[torchwood]

Hi Huffman,

Id be more concerned as your C drive is showing as full.
Programs create temporary files when performing actions, if theres NO space available then it will not work correctly or even fail.

Rule of Thumb keep 15% free

Anyway 2 things you can do
remove any progams/files or folder piecemeal, then a few at a time
According to your specs your using a 1TB drive you could increase the size of C, if possible cant say for sure as would need to see systems disk management layout

Roy

 

[LMiller7]

Is there more than one active user account? The desktop Recycle bin will only show files belonging to the logged in user. The Recycle bin may contain files from other accounts but they will not be shown. Utilities such as CleanMyPC may also show them.

 

[huffman]

I just ran CleanMyPC the latest version. It said there was 8.47GG of files in my Recycle Bin. I had it clean my Recycle Bin and said it did.

That did NOT increase the space on C-drive.

I just seems crazy to me.

 

[Megahertz07]

Run check disk. It may have cross links.

 

[Layback Bear]

Recycle Bin and $recycle bin are two different location to the best of my memory.

LMiller please correct me if I'm wrong.

My understanding is:

When you delete something in most cases it goes to the 'Recycle Bin' and when you delete the Recycle Bin things go to a hidden file '$Recycle Bin'.

My Recycle Bin when opened from the desktop is empty.
Yet my $Recycle Bin has this.



Let me know if I'm crazy; please.

Jack

 

[LMiller7]

The $RECYCLE.BIN folder acts as the physical storage for the desktop recycle bin for files deleted from that drive. There is a separate sub folder for each user for their own deleted files. This is a move operation within the volume so does not require any copying of data and is very fast. The files are renamed for security purposes. A user with sufficient privileges would be able to see the files but not see their correct names or be able to open them.

Normal users shouldn't really be using the $RECYCLE.BIN folders. It is hidden for a reason. Improper modification could corrupt the contents and prevent recovery. The details of how all this works are officially undocumented and have changed somewhat with different versions of Windows.

Edit: The one file shown in the properties dialog is the folders desktop.ini file which remains when the recycle bin is emptied. It contains some information regarding how the recycle bin will appear on the desktop.

 

[Acova]

I just ran CleanMyPC the latest version. It said there was 8.47GG of files in my Recycle Bin. I had it clean my Recycle Bin and said it did.

That did NOT increase the space on C-drive.

I just seems crazy to me.

I think things can go very wrong if you don't free up space on your storage and torchwood, does talk about the right thing. In general, they do say to keep 10% of free space of your storage for the best performance.

The last time I remember running out of space on storage, did cause me to experience very odd stuff going on, but it was 15 years ago or so xD.


Anyways, here are few more links to look at if you are curious about RB's content:
1) command line - Listing files in recycle bin - Stack Overflow
2) Dir command line options

I tried: dir C:\$Recycle.Bin /s /b
and it listed in cmd those directories it had in there.
Looking at the list, it seemed to match "77" entries I spoke about earlier.

Below is a possible example of what you may see there:
C:\$Recycle.Bin\S-1-9-46-464646464-46464564646-46456464646-4646456\$SAMPLE4.txt

 

[huffman]

I have no idea what is crazy anymore. A couple of years ago I had this same problem and because of the way my HDD is partitioned, I used EaseUS Partition Master to fix the issue. I have to free space to do it again, but I am not sure I want to. The reason is just a month or so ago my C drive (150gb) was only 60% filled. Now it is full and nothing has installed other than windows updates.

LMiller7 How to I delete what is in the $RECYCLE.BIN folder? How od I even find it?

Megahertz07 I ran Check Disk this morning and it did not find anything wrong.

BTW I am the only user on this pc.

 

[Layback Bear]

On my systems I leave $RECYCLE.BIN folders alone.

If I need more free space, I look for other ways to get the free space.

Jack

 

[Acova]

You could try changing Recycle Bin's size for trashed files.
Anything exceeding the value you set, will be removed or removed until RB has this much of trash in it.

I've made a test for this in the following way:

RB = Recycle Bin

1) My RB's size (= how much of trash my RB can hold up to) on C drive = 30 GB, but the bin is empty
2) Made 1 GB of trash files consisting of 2 files and trashed them to RB (they reside in the bin now)
3) Changed RB's size for trash from 30 GB down to 100 MB.
4) RB became empty (because it doesn't allow more than 100 MB of trash, and I had 2 files, each 500 MB in it, so they both had fallen into criteria of getting deleted due to this restriction)
5) Since it was a test, I restored my RB's size back to 30GB, for no good reason... I've always been fine with RB being 2 GB large before.. ;D

---

As the last resort, you could try the link I shared in my earlier post. (guide by Brink)
Though I do agree with people stating that no user should be playing with $RECYCLE.BIN or its insides.
It seems to me that it is hard coded there, it's not even on basic level of being hidden there if you think about it ;D