The Windows Recycle Bin has been around for a long time. It’s a useful feature, that allows you a chance to recover deleted files and folders if you decide that you still need them. Obviously, these files still take up space on your hard drive. Recycle Bin automatically assigns a storage size it thinks is appropriate for itself based on available hard drive space.
Once this space is filled, it will start permanently deleting the oldest files to make space for the most recently deleted ones. However, it is possible to manually configure the size of the Recycle Bin, if you want to override Window’s default allocation. This will effectively affect how soon files are deleted – a larger bin with more space means that your files will be around for longer, while a smaller bin will mean that files will be deleted and replaced with newer deleted files sooner.
This guide will cover how to manually change the allocated size of the Recycle Bin in Windows 10. First, you want to open the Recycle Bin itself. The quickest two ways to do this are to double-click the icon on your desktop or to press the Windows key, type “Recycle Bin” and hit enter. Click “Recycle Bin properties”, it’s located in the “Recycle Bin Tools” tab in the top bar of the Recycle Bin.
In the Recycle Bin Properties window, you can configure the amount of space that is allocated to the Recycle Bin per hard drive. To select a hard drive to configure, just click a hard drive from the top box – there may only be one if your computer only has one.
To configure the amount of space allocated to the selected hard drive, ensure that “Custom size” is selected and then enter a value into the text box. You can disable the Recycle Bin by selecting “Don’t move files to the Recycle Bin. Remove files immediately when deleted.”.
Once you’re happy with your changes to the Recycle Bin, click “OK” or “Apply” to save your changes.
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