An FYI. Weeks ago I intended to - essentially - quit computers. Just set the
machine up to take care of itself, and finish the work I'd been doing for
months. Then I inadvertently deleted thousands of jpegs, many of which I'd
edited, and I've been coming here since because I've been recovering all
that work, which required undeleting many times more copies of the jpegs
than I'd 'lost'. You know, many are unuseable, many look useable until
opened and you find they're part of the file you wanted and part of another,
or part blank. And all sorts of other curious effects, but, as with digital
photography itself, take dozens of shots and you'll almost certainly get one
or two good ones! And now I have just about recovered all the work.
What happened was, in narrowing down the duplicates I use EasyCleaner to
find them, them delete them to the Recycle Bin, then either restore the
copies I want and delete the rest, or change the name of the folder they
were deleted from then restore them, so now there is a folder containing
only duplicates, and I compare and restore/delete from there.
Similarly, to get rid of a few dozen empty folders among hundreds of folders
that aren't, I search for all files and folders, delete the lot, then open
the Recycle Bin, restore the files and delete the remaining 0 KB folders.
Only the ones that had anything in them are recreated, the rest are gone.
What had happened was EasyCleaner found so many thousand duplicates, but
when deleted, there would be considerably fewer in the Recycle Bin. It just
happened again only this time I backed them up first (obviously I should
have first time around - but this is the kind of issue I'm having
post-accident. Absent-mindedness is, I suppose, what its called).
I immediately restored the contents of the Recycle Bin and ran the duplicate
file search again and, sure enough, this time it found about 200 fewer. And
it finally hit me. I doubt if EasyCleaner is the problem, but don't know for
sure. I deleted files in excess of the reserved space for the Recycle Bin!
Only instead of warning you, Windows just goes ahead and deletes the files.
To the Bin while there's space, and permanently once it's exceeded!
I'm only used to exceeding the reserved Recycle Bin space when deleting
drive images, or folders containing files that exceed the Bin capacity, when
one does indeed see a warning. For all I know when you delete multiple small
files individually en masse uncontained by a folder (?) this *is* what
happens anyway. But if not, I guess it's a bug, either in EasyCleaner,
programs like EasyCleaner, or Explorer.
No doubt it's rarely encountered because drives/volumes are ordinarily so
large a mere 1.5 GB of deleted files will come nowhere near to exceeding the
Recycle Bin capacity - but even if with processing power, RAM size etc,
today, massive partitions are not nonsensical, I will never believe they're
a good idea on 9x systems! And it's when partitioning that this danger
occurs. I never dreamt for a moment I'd delete enough jpegs to exceed the
Recycle Bin space on a 14.2 GB volume!
I just changed the global Recycle Bin size to 15%. I used to have it lower
than the default 10% but it was too much hassle in 98SE.
Shane