Terry said:
Is there any way to determine when the Recycle Bin was last emptied
please?
I happened to open it this morning to look for a file and was surprised to
find that it contained only one 3 GB file I'd deleted a few minutes
earlier. So I'm wondering why all the earlier deletions aren't shown, or
at least many of them.
What are the rules about this? If the Recycle Bin is already close to its
capacity limit, does a new large deletion replace older ones? What *is*
the limit, and is it user-settable?
There is a slider to control how much space is reserved (but not
allocated) for use by the Recycle Bin. As that space gets used up, the
older items get moved out (permanently deleted) to make room for the
newly deleted items that move in.
While this sounds great, you don't really get the size shown by the
slider. The maximum setting is 100%. Think about it. Would you really
ever want deleted files to suck up 100% of your disk's capacity? That
means there would be no room for the OS to generate its pagefile or
other temp files and your applications won't work.
Say you move the slider to 12%. That might lead you to believe that up
to 12% of your hard disk could be used to retain the deleted files.
Wrong. The maximum disk space usable by the Recycle Bin is 4GB. If you
have a 500GB hard disk and set the slider to 12%, you do NOT get 60GB of
disk space available for use by the Recycle Bin. You still only get 4GB
max. So if you had a 2GB file in the Recycle Bin and then deleted a 3GB
file then ALL of that 2GB file has to get moved out of the Recycle Bin
to make room for the newly deleted 3GB file. 2GB + 3GB exceeds the 4GB
max space for the Recycle Bin.
For Windows XP, the maximum disk space usable by the Recycle Bin is
3.99GB. That is by design. In fact, if you delete a file larger than
4GB then it won't ever appear in the Recycle Bin. The file is too big
to fit in the available max disk space. The space usable (not
allocated) to the Recycle Bin is n% of your disk's capacity up to a
maximum of 4GB, whichever is smaller.
Vista changed the algorithm used to determine the maximum space
available to the Recycle Bin. For hard disk partitions up to 40GB,
Vista follows the Windows XP where the Recycle Bin can be up to 10
percent of the drive's capacity or 4GB, whichever is smaller. For bigger
partitions, the maximum is 4GB plus 5% of the capacity over 40GB. For
example, with a 500GB partition, the Recycle Bin's maximum available
space to hold deleted files would be 4GB (for the first 40GB) plus 5% of
remaining 460GB for a total of or 27GB.
With Windows XP, you're stuck with a max disk space of 4GB for the
Recycle Bin. With Vista, and up, 5% more is added to that maximum based
on the size of the partition over 40GB.
