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Where’s the Recycle Bin on My USB Drive?

Question: I had a file on a USB pen drive I accidentally deleted. I went to the Recycle Bin folder to recover it. But the file was not there. Luckily the file was not very important. I have experimented with deleting files on the USB pen drive and it appears the deleted files do not go to the Recycle Bin. Where do the files go? Is it possible to undo a delete from a USB pen drive?

As you’ve found out, there’s not always a Recycle Bin. I’ve also seen it be present but go unused.

It’s confusing and surprising, but the Recycle Bin seems to be used inconsistently across versions of Windows, at least when it comes to what Windows considers to be a “removable” device.

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The intent

Drives that are considered “removable” — like your USB Pen Drive — should not have recycle bins at all.

My belief is that it has to do with the assumption that removable drives are typically too small to hold them. Drives accessed over a network also don’t use a recycle bin, but I believe that’s due to network performance, among other issues.

The confusion

The actual folder containing the Recycle Bin can have different names, depending on the file system used and the version of Windows you run.

  • On FAT filesystems, it’s \RECYCLED at the root of the drive.
  • On NTFS filesystems created in Windows versions prior to Vista, it’s \RECYCLER.
  • On NTFS filesystems created in Windows Vista and later, it’s \$Recycle.Bin.

From what I can tell, different operating systems also treat the concept of “removable” slightly differently (or at least inconsistently).

My 32GB USB thumb drive has no Recycle Bin, but my 250GB external USB drive does. In fact, since I move that external hard drive from system to system (and I still have almost all versions of Windows), it has both “\RECYCLER” as well as “\$Recycle.Bin”.

Both are removable USB drives; one gets a Recycle Bin, the other does not. I can only assume it’s somehow related to the size of the drive.

What to do?

Well, one piece of advice I can certainly give you: don’t rely on the Recycle Bin.

The Recycle Bin is not intended to be a temporary storage location, and you shouldn’t treat it like one. Always assume that deleting a file means the file will be deleted, permanently and forever.

In other words, whenever you delete, make sure you mean it.

The Recycle Bin is only a safety net, and as we’ve seen, you may not be able to count on it always being there.

The good news about USB drives is that they are treated as just that: disk drives. When you do delete a file and there’s no Recycle Bin to save you, you may still have a few options.

When that happens:

  • Stop using the drive. The ability to recover a truly deleted file is extremely dependent on other activity on the drive. If you continue to use the drive, the chances of actually recovering a file on it disappear quickly.
  • Start looking into UnDelete utilities. I’ve done this only rarely, but if the drive has not been used since the delete, a good undelete utility may be able to recover it.

One of the ways a USB device differs from a true hard drive is if it’s based on flash memory, as most USB thumb drives are. The forensic techniques used to recover data on magnetic hard drives don’t work on flash drives; they’re solid state, without magnetic material. If a file on flash memory can’t be recovered using undelete utilities the chances of it being recovered are next to nil.

Again, only hit Delete when you mean it.

Oh, and back up often. That’s the other way to recover deleted files: if they’ve been backed up elsewhere before they were deleted.

In most cases, that’s the best precaution of all.

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16 comments on “Where’s the Recycle Bin on My USB Drive?”

  1. I think the difference between a USB “flash drive” and an external hard drive connected via USB is simply just the drivers required, and Windows picks up on this when deciding to have a Recycle Bin or not.

    So I think Windows’ checker is basically looking to see if the drive’s memory is solid state (IE flash memory) or magnetic (IE a hard disk). A way to test this would be to try and find an ancient 4 gig hard disk and put it in a USB enclosure, to see if Windows gives it a Recycle Bin.

    Though correct me if I’m wrong, but you can also force Windows to give a flash drive a recycle bin even if it doesn’t give it one automatically, right?

    Reply
  2. > My 32gig USB thumbdrive has no Recycle Bin,
    > but my 250gig external USB drive does.

    I bet your 32gig USB thumbdrive is FAT32.
    I’ll also bet your 250gig external USB drive is NTFS.

    Perhaps the FAT32 vs NTFS has something to do with whether a Recycle Bin is present or not?

    Reply
  3. Very important to note:
    If your USB pen drive HAS a recycle bin directory you are most likely infected with a virus or trojan. A quick confirmation of this would be to insert another pen drive and see if the directory is instantly created! The directory will be hiding a trojan (if you are lucky to be able to see this hidden file) and you most likely will have a autorun.inf in the root of the drive referencing the file. The only sure way I know of cleaning this trojan / virus is to boot from a boot DVD or CD with a good AV and trojan cleaner. Check all your drives carefully and don’t put your USB drives in any other machine (Pen and hard drives) till they have been cleaned.

    Reply
  4. I”ve had the same problem with having deleted without doing on purpose, the way I found easy to recover was to install a PROGRAM on my pc which is called CARD RECOVERY and best of all FREE to download

    Enjoy

    Reply
  5. The best way to remove a virus from a USB Drive is to go to Run, type cmd, select open. In the Command Window type e: amd press enter on your keyboard. Then type the following command rd /s recyler This will delete the recycler and the virus at the same time. It also work if the system is a FAT system by changing recycler to recycled

    That’s true only if the virus is in the recycle bin on the device. If it’s not, it didn’t help.

    Leo
    17-Nov-2009

    Reply
  6. i also experience this problem in which I delete a file accidentally and not stored in recycle bin because I delete it from my USB, it makes me feel frustrated because the file which I deleted is VERY very important for my final project. Part of it I blame it on myself because i keep pressing the delete button because the computer was not responding and part of it I blame it on the computer because if it was responding, I could easily know if my unwanted file is already deleted and will not keep pressing the delete button…. I hope that someday SOMEDAY people who work on computers will invent a recycle bin type that can store deleted files from USB…

    Reply
  7. If I have a recycle bin on my external hard drive how can I see it, or the containing of it? The hard drive is in NTFS format and I run Windows 7 on my PC?

    The recycle bin icon on your desktop should show it. Double click on that.

    Leo
    24-Aug-2012
    Reply
  8. For the first time in my life, when the autoplay window appeared after I plugged in my external hard drive, i have clicked on “play video files using VideoLAN VLC Media player”! The thing is that I found some files that I could not locate on my hard drive and when I checked the file path in the VLC playlist It showed something like “G:\\$RECYCLE.BIN\S-1-5-21-30258965-771759058-2807463574-1000\$R2DPHV5.iNT-PFa\Filename”(Windows does not recognize that path)! So what is strange for me is the fact that even if it appears to be a file located in a recycle bin that I cannot find I can still play the video files with no problem! I also do not know where the files came from but I did have borrowed the hard drive to other people and that could explain it! My dilemma right now is how can I restore some of those files if I cannot locate that recycle bin folder and also how can I delete the rest of them?

    Use the recycle bin icon to identify and restore (un-delete) any files you want to operate on, and empty the recycle bin using its icon to permanently delete all files in the recycle bin. You should not be using any files directly that you find in recycle bin folders on various hard disks.

    Leo
    25-Aug-2012
    Reply
  9. I appreciate the fact that you found the time to answer my questions but I have to say that the answers were no good! However I would like to say that I found the answer I was looking for! I opened the external hard disk with WinRAR and this way I could see all the hidden files and folders on it including the recycle bin that I was not able to find before.

    Reply
  10. My daughter was quite upset when she found out the pictures she took of our summer vacation at grandma’s and grandpa’s farm had disappeared from the tablet that she shares with her siblings. No recycle bin there in Android. I popped out the SD card and put it in my laptop and was able to use Recuva to recover most of the pictures. Unfortunately, she had taken a few more pictures before realizing they were gone. Copied them all to my laptop until we got home and was able to properly back up.

    Reply
  11. The delete dialog box is different whether drive you are deleting from has a recycle bin or not. When it has a recycle bin, you will usually get a message like “Are you sure you want to move this file [or folder] to the Recycle Bin?”. If there is no recycle bin you’ll usually get “Are you sure you want to permanently delete this file [or folder]?” In the Recycle Bin settings, I’ve set it so that I don’t get the warning when I’m not permanently deleting. That makes me more aware when I’m about to permanently delete a file since if I had the warning each time I was recycling a file, I might not pay attention to the more serious warning.

    Reply
  12. I bet to differ on all this. Linux and Apple have a Trash Bin on flash memory, pretty much all drives, and even Zip-drives on Apple Computer have one. I consider this to be a good thing. The trash bin/recycle bin on Apple and Linux and their own Bin for each drive and to relinguish space, you must empty it after you determine that you are sure you want your files anymore. Just like Windows a HDD/SDD uses up space and to regain it, you must remove the files from the Bin. And on SDD which is similar to a Flash drive, wheather internal or external, it has a bin on Windows, so there goes that theroy for type of drive. Meaning the term, Solid State which refers to non-moving parts . And for the size of the drive being smaller and should not have a bin because it is a floppy or flash memory, Windows on the SSD/HDD drives, it does support using a bin and you can set a size limit, so to me, it being smaller is not applicable. When I hook up my old 120 Mb IDE drive externally to the usb port, the fact it being smaller, shouldn’t that theory apply, that being smaller, It shouldn’t have a bin? No, It should, In fact, Bins in windows are based on the percentage of the drive and can be ajusted accordingly, so a person should be able to have a bin on any deviced be it mechanical or not mechanical . And while we are on size with USB flash drives, look at your usb ssd and hdd that are smaller than a persons main storage on their computer, shouldn’t that apply. To read all these excusees why and why not, is ridiculous. The answer is, Microsoft wants to be different and not conform to what people want. Unix came out before Windows did, and Linux is based on Unix, and so is the APPLE OS,

    if Linux can put a Bin on a flash drive, and files deleted pertain to that drives storage only, then I see no problem. The thing is Windows keeps track of files deleted, like a library and assigns separated bins for eash drive from my experience, The trash bin, should be assigned per drive/partiton/volume, and be selectable by users choice to have on, IF linux can do it, then MS can do it too, if they want to. IN fact, in windows, I always set the bin size on an exteranl HDD to be a lot smaller than my internal drive, even if it is 5 times greater. And pretty much 95% of people that I have been around because of computers, don’t even know you that you can ajust the size of the bin for each drive. You can even set it down to 0% on and external drive. And yes you can put a recycle bin on the flash drive if you or 3rd party writes the software to do it. You can even uses certain drivers on the web, which I have seen done, to mask your usb as a local drive using the Hitachi Microdrive driver and playing around with it, which is talked about on the web, but mostly to put more than one partition on a flash drive. But with Windows, in 2017/03, Microsoft fixed that problem, and Windows 10 supports it now, and I heard maybe windows 8.1, builds 1703 does, but have not tested for that. I can confirm, if you create windows 10 recovery USB Flash drive, with multipartitions and boot to it, you can have as many images it can hold on the second partition and apply the images using DISM via command line to the computer. Although, I have not put Win 7 image on a Windows 10 bootable flash drive with two partitions, I am sure you can apply it with windows 10 using it’s DISM, with no problem, it is just a tool, and actually DISM in windows 10 has more features than if using DISM windows 7 version.

    Reply
  13. Hello and thank you for this information!

    Otherwise, there is an open source software that performs the function of the Windows USB Recycle Bin, automatically moving the deleted files to a normal folder that you can explore to recover your files as if you had never deleted them.

    You can find it here:
    Sourceforge.net/projects/usb-recycle-bin/

    Enjoy it!

    Reply

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