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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?

Oliver Salzburg
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Raveren
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3 Answers3

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The Old New Thing seems to explain it: Why does the Recycle Bin have different file system names on FAT and NTFS?

FAT drives just use a folder C:\RECYCLED, and NTFS drives use the set of folders C:\RECYCLER\S-.... So it sound like your toolbar is just looking in there. I had a look once without it (sadly don't remember how.)

So: the hack is probably just to look in a hidden folder. I don't have a Windows machine on me to look at and test how easy it is to get in there. I doubt that Windows Explorer will do it, but cmd might. (At your own risk, etc.)

The next question is why Microsoft "lock" the files. It's probably so no one starts using the bin as their My Documents folder, or so you have to make a decision -- restore or delete, but no peeking.

Glorfindel
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GKFX
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I think the best way to handle it would be to drag & drop all of the contents into a new folder to do the analysis of what needs to be opened / kept / deleted. This will at least save you from needing to track down the restore location of each file.

Jason Gordon
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your problem has been an enterprise problem since the birth of the recycle bin... users have always been able to use the recycle bin as a storage feature and I have seen a dozen users consider it their DRP... they simply never empty the bin and they think they are covered... but then they work out of it and edit documents that they have deleted.

I have always treated the solution to this problem as more education.

Shayne Neal
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