Recycle Bin, deleted amount

Help & Support
1

Not a problem, but more like an investigation.

Once I tried to empty Recycle Bin, and once confirmed, noticed that I'm deleting an terabyte of data.
Paused after few percent.
Went to see what's there, because usually in folder I have way less.
Opened Bin and saw that there are only like 30GBs.
Tried again, and via DO we removed these 30.
I approximately remembered what filenames were wiped.
Went to Everything, and tried to search.
Saw 700GBs in Recycle Bin in particular drive only.

Then all were more clear, on that drive, weeks ago I restored one backup file, and later wiped files.

  1. When figured out where files were, tried to open that location in DO to see these.
    But even when enable to show EVERYTHING mode, saw only directory in which there was no files shown.
    While Everything app, showed me a list of these.

Could it be, that if DO not elevated, it cant show such files, while Everything once started is "elevated" and shows these ?

(In default Explorer I also could not see these files, even when used option Hidden files + Show system files)

  1. Another strange piece was, in first Empty procedure, DO tried to wipe huge amount of files.
    But once cancelled, and repeated it wiped files, but not huge ones on another drive.

Any idea or suggestion why this could happen ?

Only have an screenshot from Everything.

956×170 4.93 KB

2

The Recycle Bin is handled by Windows. Opus isn't really involved here, which is also why you see the same in File Explorer.

You can look at the raw files by going into the $RECYCLE.BIN directory, which is what Everything is showing you, but it's not usually very useful as they all have random names.

3

When I firstly I tried to see what files were wiped, with Recuva. Yes, saw random names.
But once cancelled initial clean, Everything app showed me proper filenames in Bin.

Seems random ones, are only when you attempt to recover.

Could it be that DO nor Explorer showed me nothing, because non-admin were not supposed to see these. Maybe I actually when removed, did it under admin user?

4

The Recycle Bin folder is special in Windows. It's not just individual files but also a database of the file's names and paths before they were deleted, the date and time they were deleted, and similar details.

(That's also why we delegate it to the Windows shell. If we showed you the raw files on disk, it wouldn't be useful.)

If you use a tool like Recuva to "undelete" files that were inside the Recycle Bin, it probably isn't going to work well, and the database isn't going to be consistent with the files on disk afterwards.