Configuring the Recycle Bin

The Recycle Bin holds recently deleted files to provide you with a reasonable opportunity to recover them. As we talked about in Chapter 4, the Recycle Bin will hold the last deleted files that fit within its size restriction. That restriction by default is 10% of the drive space for each partition or volume on the system. However, you can and should customize the Recycle Bin for your specific needs.

The Recycle Bin's Properties dialog box (accessed by right-clicking over the icon, and then selecting Properties) has a Global tab and a tab for each partition/volume on the system. The Global tab offers a control that allows you to configure your drives independently or to use one setting for all drives (the default). If you've never deleted a file by mistake and don't think you ever will, you can elect to delete files immediately without storing them in the Recycle Bin. If you'd rather just limit how much space Windows uses to store deleted files, you can set a maximum size for the Recycle Bin as a percentage of drive space. A final control on the Global tab enables a deletion confirmation dialog boxI think this should be left enabled.

Remember, if you select to configure the properties for each drive independently, you must use the provided tabs labeled for each drive on your system. Each drive will display the size of the drive and the space reserved for the Recycle Bin along with the other controls we just discussed.

When limiting the amount of space to use for deleted files, the default percentage is 10%. This is usually a good size, but as hard disk sizes increase, you may want to reduce this to 5%. Keep in mind that files moved to the Recycle Bin are not actually deleted. Instead, their path information is removed from the normal interfaces and moved into the Recycle Bin. Deleted files still remain on the drive exactly where they were before the deletion operation. This means they take up space on the drive. So, if you leave the default percentage setting at 10% on a 20GB hard drive, you can have up to 2GB of deleted files still sitting on the drive slowing down the drive's seek time.