Tip #3837 - Recycle Bin Storage
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Recycle
Bin Storage
Are you aware that
your Recycle Bin could be eating up a large portion of your hard drive
space? Well, believe it or not, but by default, the Recycle Bin is set
to have a total storage capacity of 10 percent of each of your local drives.
For example, if you
have a hard drive that has been formatted into two logical drives (the
term “logical” is used, because there is only one drive that
has been formatted into portions), your Recycle Bin will consume 10 percent
of each logical drive. The following real life example will help clarify
this.
The Recycle Bin on
my computer had a storage capacity of 10 percent of each logical drive.
As the picture below shows, I have two logical drives.
Now, my C: drive has
a storage capacity of 4.86 GB and my D: drive has a capacity of 9.09GB.
My Recycle Bin, therefore, has a capacity of 1.46 GB, which is reserved
for deleted files (10 percent of 4.86 + 10 percent of 9.09 = 1.46GB).
What a waste! Take a look.
Space Reserved
on C: Drive
Space Reserved
on D: Drive
If you are not used
to emptying your Recycle Bin after deleting files, this translates into
lost storage space for you. It’s best to set your Recycle Bin storage
percentage to a lower number. To change the amount of space your Recycle
Bin reserves for you, just right click on your Recycle Bin
icon on your desktop and choose Properties. You should
then see the following:
Right click again
and hold your left mouse button over the scroll bar and drag it to the
left. You will see the percentage change to a lower number. It’s
a good idea to set your Recycle Bin storage space percentage to approximately
two percent. However, it depends on you, as to how much space you want
your Recycle Bin to reserve.
Once you have set
your Recycle Bin’s default percentage of 10 percent to a lower number,
click on the tabs next to the Global tag to see how many
megabytes of space your Recycle Bin is reserving on each hard drive.
So, now you might
be wondering what happens when your reserved space runs out. Well, once
the space reserved for deleted files is exhausted, additional files you
delete will not be stored in the Recycle Bin, but they will be permanently
deleted from your hard drive. To see an example of this, follow the steps
below.
Move the scroll bar
all the way to the left until the percentage number becomes zero. Then
click the Apply button at the bottom.
Next, right click
on your desktop and select the New option. Another box
will pop up. Select Text Document. Now, click the right
mouse button anywhere on your desktop. You have just created a new file.
Then delete the file.
As you can see, the
deleted file was not stored in the Recycle Bin, but it was permanently
deleted from your hard drive.
Similarly, once the
reserved storage space you set your Recycle Bin to is exhausted, additional
files you delete will be permanently deleted from your computer. Keep
this in mind when choosing the amount of space you want your Recycle Bin
to reserve for storage of deleted files.
Different
Storage Options
If you like, you can
also set your Recycle Bin to reserve a certain amount of storage space
on one drive and a different amount of storage on another hard drive.
To do so, simply click on the Globals tab and then select
the “Configure drives independently” option.
The portion of the
screen below will become grayed out. Now, click on the Local Drive
tabs next to the Globals tag above. As you can
see, you can now drag the cursor to a certain percentage number independently
for each of your drives. How great is that?!
Happy recycling!
~ Zeeshan Parvez
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