What Is the Recycle Bin?

Files and folders deleted from your hard drives don't go away completely, at least not right away-they remain inside the Recycle Bin. From there, they can either be restored to the folder they were in before you deleted them or moved from the Recycle Bin to any other folder via cut-and-paste or drag-and-drop.

The Recycle Bin icon lives on the desktop and looks like a wastebasket. When you open the icon, Windows Explorer shows you the files and folders that were deleted since the Recycle Bin was last emptied.

The Recycle Bin is a hybrid object that behaves like a folder in some ways, but not in others. Like a folder, it contains objects, and you can move objects into and out of the Recycle Bin, just as you do with any other folder. Unlike a folder, even an unusual folder like the Desktop folder, the Recycle Bin is not contained on a single drive. Instead, each of your computer's hard drives (or partitions of hard drives, if your drive is partitioned) maintains its own Recycle Bin.

Folders that have been sent to the Recycle Bin aren't considered part of the folder tree: they don't appear in the Navigation Pane, and they can't be opened. If you want to examine the contents of a folder in the Recycle Bin, you first must move the folder out of the Recycle Bin to a different location. Likewise, files in the Recycle Bin cannot be opened, edited, or worked on otherwise .

The intention of the designers is clear: the Recycle Bin is not to be used as a workspace. Instead, it is a last-chance repository. You can put things in the Recycle Bin or take things out-that's all.

Working with the Recycle Bin under the default settings is covered in "Retrieving Files and Folders from the Recycle Bin" later in this chapter. Reconfiguring the Recycle Bin settings is covered in the next chapter (see "Managing the Recycle Bin" in Chapter 9).