Leading on from yesterday’s blog entry regarding the practice of emptying the Recycle Bin (or Trash in Mac OS X) I thought it was worth covering how to set the maximum size of the Recycle Bin in Windows to prevent it from growing too large. This is of particular importance on smaller drives in netbooks or more expensive drives like sold state drives and high speed drives (like Western Digital Raptors, SCSI or SAS drives).
Anyway, the way you can get at the Recycle Bin settings is by:
- Right clicking on the Recycle Bin,
- Left click on “Properties”.
You should then see a window similar to one of the below:
- Windows Vista/7 – Recycle Bin Properties
- Windows XP – Recycle Bin Properties
Under Windows Vista/7 you can set a specific limit for the amount of drive space allocated to the Recycle Bin by clicking on each drive and then typing in your specified limit in the box. As you can see, I have around 48GB set aside for my data partition (which has been the default) which is the best size of 1.5TB.
Windows XP is a little different in that you can’t specify a numerical amount but instead you use a slider in increments of 1% which can be representative of 20GB on a 2TB drive. This doesn’t give as granular control as you do under Windows Vista & 7 but it’s all that you have unfortunately. Windows XP also gives you the option of using a global allocation of space for the Recycle Bin across all drives or independent allocation for each drive (which is how Windows Vista and 7 operates).
You’ll also notice options to skip the movement of files to the Recycle Bin upon deletion and instead permanently delete files but I would recommend against effectively disabling the Recycle Bin. It’s a great safeguard that even seasoned veterans fall back upon when they get too excited deleting content from their drives.
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