recycle-bin interview questions
Top recycle-bin frequently asked interview questions
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but when you "delete" something from your PC all your computer does is write over some of the binary with 0's replacing the 1's. (Or something to that effect) So when you send something to the recycle bin it writes over part of the file, and when you delete from the recycle bin it writes more?
Source: (StackOverflow)
How do I open the Recycle Bin from the command line?
I'd be very glad if there is a built-in Windows command.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I hate having anything on my desktop. I usually remove all the icons from the desktop, even the recycle bin. Occasionally I need to access the recycle bin, but having to re-enable the icon just to open it, is annoying.
I was hoping I could use the windows search bar built into the start menu but typing "recycle" or "recycle bin", but that returns nothing.
How else can I access the recycle bin without using the desktop icon?
Source: (StackOverflow)
Is there a command line program that can send files to the recycle bin?
This is on XP and Vista.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I was using another account before. Let me call it account A. And I deleted a lot of files to the Recycycle Bin at that time. But before I removed account A I forgot to empty the Recycle Bin.
My question is, are my files still there? I've searched and found that the Recycle Bin may live in $Recycle.Bin, but I can't open files there so I can't know what they are. Any help how to open deleted files or how to delete them permanently?
Source: (StackOverflow)
I have deleted about half a million files from a folder, and didn't think to press Shift in order to delete them completely straight away.
Now they're clogging my recycle bin, and Windows claims it will take 4 hours to empty it - it claims to do about 68 files per second.
Is there some magic or an alternative method that can speed this up?
Bounty - I'm starting a bounty. The files are still in my bin, as there was no pressing need to get rid of them and this way, I can try out the suggestions presented. I am, however, looking for a way that does not include hard-deleting the contents of the RECYCLER folder - I'm sure that would work, but it feels a bit unclean to me.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I have a $RECYCLE.BIN folder on my external hard disk that takes up space and contains files that should be deleted permanently. I know that I am allowed to delete this folder, but how do I do that?
- I see the
$RECYCLE.BIN folder and its files in Defraggler while it is defragmenting these useless (big) files.
- However, the Windows recycle bin appears to be empty.
- Doing a disk cleanup from the Properties-dialog of the disk shows the recycle bin as containing 0 bytes of data and doesn't remove those files.
- I cannot see (and therefore not delete) this folder in Windows Explorer, not even when I can view hidden files.
- I can't format the external hard disk as it contains lots of files I want to keep.
- It is an NTFS-formatted external platter hard disk of a bit less than 1 TB.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I just noticed that I can open folders from the recycle bin without restoring them. I have the qttabbar extension that adds tabs to the standard windows explorer and I accidentally middle-clicked a folder.
It not only opened fine in a tab, but its contents behaved as if not deleted: proper open action and a full right-click menu.
That means all that's keeping users from opening files inside of recycle bin is that there's no menu action/open handler or whatever.
To be fair, notepad2 did choke on opening a file from a subfolder in recycle bin (bad path), although notepad++ handled the same file just fine. Thus this feature might not be for the faint of heart, but it would be extremely useful when crawling through heaps of garbage :)
Has anyone heard of such a hack/feature?
Source: (StackOverflow)
We have a "Users" folder that is the root of all user files and network profiles.
Using a directory size utility (WinDirStat), I stumbled upon a strange and worrisome problem - thousands of files effectively hidden in the Windows Recycle Bin interface. Each user's folder has a RECYCLER folder directly under My Documents, such as:
\\server1\Users\smithj\smithj's Documents\RECYCLER\S-1-5-21-nnnnnn
Very few of our users have PCs, as most users login to a Citrix Application server from a simple Wyse terminal. Because most of their file activity is on network shares, the users (and we admins) have always understood there is no "Network Recycle Bin."
However, the hidden RECYCLER folder for most users has thousands of files. Several things stand out:
- In most cases, none of the files are visible using the Recycle Bin interface
- The naming convention for the individual files should include a drive letter such as
DC or DD, but instead they all start with D@ - for example, D@1234.doc.
- I believe the
@ symbol is preventing Windows from dereferencing the original files, so they are simply suppressed in the user interface.
- The files together consume tens of Gigabytes. They are not ghosts. Deleting some files does increase the free space on the drive.
- It seems we actually do have a "Network Recycle Bin." By accident. Without real file names.
We have already decided we will delete all files older than X days. I can do that with a PowerShell script. Unlike this similar case, we are going to delete individual files instead of the entire folder.
So, my questions:
- Has anyone seen these
@ symbols in Recycle Bin files?
- All network drive access is through mapped drives. Could this explain why the files are recycled? And hidden?
- Although we run daily backups, I only want to tap this resource for last-resort file recovery. Any suggestions or warnings?
Source: (StackOverflow)
On Windows XP, the total size of Recycle Bin could be seen easily, but I can't see it on Windows 7. Why did Microsoft hide/remove this feature? Am I missing something?
REMARK 1: I don't need to see the maximum size that Recyle Bin can contain.
REMARK 2: Once you have several files selected in the Recycle Bin, you get a "See more details" link in the status bar, but clicking on that does not display the total file size. Microsoft has apparently changed this.
Source: (StackOverflow)
It's only at the system's volumine. Although I'm logged as an administrator, I cannot open this! The shown exception isn't so self-explanatory, as you've probably noticed. What's the purpose of this directory and how to check the content?
Source: (StackOverflow)
I understand that the Recycle Bin is shared amongst local drives (partitions). When a file is "deleted" and sent to the Recycle Bin, does the file itself stay on the partition it was in prior to deletion, or is it moved to a centralised area (say on the drive Windows is installed)?
Example:
A PC has one hard drive:
C - Main partition with Windows OS
D - Extra partition on same physical drive
E - A further partition on same physical drive
If I delete a file on drive D, does the file stay on drive D in the Recycle Bin, or is it moved to a centralised Recycle Bin area on drive C? When viewing the RECYCLER folder on a partition it shows the contents of the Recycle Bin from all partitions.
Using XP Home SP 3, NTFS.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I have a Windows 7 desktop which has 3 drive mappings to CIFS shares on a FreeBSD home server. There are also special folders (Desktop, etc) stored on the CIFS shares.
Each of these (including the special folders for some reason) has its own Recycle Bin settings, which I've configured such that the Recycle Bin is not used. However, I see a $RECYCLE.BIN folder created on my desktop every time I delete a file anywhere on my computer (including local disks which also have the Recycle Bin disabled) which is rather annoying.
Inside this folder is always a desktop.ini. Normally I can't see other desktop.ini files on the local drives as I have protected OS files hidden.
I can't hide the folder as CIFS doesn't seem to store the hidden or system attributes (thus why I'm seeing the desktop.ini files also) despite telling the client to treat dotfiles as hidden.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I am using Windows 7 daily as a limited user with UAC enabled. I log in as $USER and have have a dummy user called $ADMIN with Administrative access I use for elevation purposes.
Unfortunately, some elevated applications are aware of being elevated: running Explorer as admin still shows $USER's folders and permissions. Some other applications are not, and will try and access $ADMIN's folders and permissions.
In particular, I used a program (yes, I'm looking at you, TuneUp 2010) to find and delete cruft from my system. Unfortunately, when an elevated TuneUp deletes files it uses the $ADMIN's recycling bin.
Now. I don't want to log in as $ADMIN. It's a dummy account. It isn't supposed to be logged into. It's just there for elevation purposes. I don't want it to have a profile, a home folder and settings for it.
So what I want to do is use elevation to access $ADMIN's recycle bin and cleanly empty it. Windows seems to offer no way to do so, unfortunately:
- Running Explorer as $ADMIN from the GUI will result in the $USER's folders being used.
Running explorer as $ADMIN from the command prompt (using the elevate powertoy, for example) results in the following error message:
Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.
[OK]
- Running
start . from an elevated command prompt results in the above error message.
- Running notepad as $ADMIN and using the Open dialog as a primitive Explorer shows no way to access the recycling bin. Right clicking files from that screen will result in a temporary hang and in no menu being shown.
Attempting to open the raw Recycling bin "raw" folder,
C:\$Recycle.Bin\S-1-5-21-1970411373-1708269306-xxxxxxxxxx-1007\, from the above Open dialog results in the following error message:
Recycle Bin
You don’t have permission to open this file.
Contact the file owner or an administrator to obtain permission.
[OK]
I "fixed" the issue by issuing "del * /S /F /Q" from an elevated prompt from inside the bin "raw" folder but that's obviously not the way to go.
What should have I done instead?
It seems my question was not clear enough. How surprising. :)
Here's what I am trying to achieve. All I want to do is open this window as $ADMIN:
Source: (StackOverflow)
In the Recycle Bin, I sorted by 'Date Modified', but the result is not in the proper order. It was neither ascending nor descending.
Other sorts (by Date deleted, size, item type) all work well.
Does anybody have the same problem?
Source: (StackOverflow)