Windows 10: External drive and recycle bin.....what's happening?

Hi All,
Something odd that I can't get my head around.
When I looked in the "Recycle bin", it was completely empty.
I then connected my external drive ( drive i) and several files appeared in the recycle bin.
I restored one of the files, and it went into another drive (drive H)???

I was thinking that perhaps when I originally deleted these files, my external drive was "H" and not "i"
therefore restoring them put them back into "H"
Where are these files kept???? *Huh

:)

 

How to empty external drive using recycle bin on Windows 10 computer.

TreeSize is a program that expands all you folders and files to see the contents.

External drives like internal ones need to be emptied now and then.

I use recycle bin to empty internal and then %temp% to remove left over temp files.

External drives receive things like images. After a while they need to be cleaned or they will not have any space to image to.

I have read that some people use recycle to empty both the internal drive and external drive bins.

I am asking how they do this.

Or, alternatively how would you empty the recycle bin on an external drive.

This recycle bin is visible with TreeSize if you are interested to see what I am talking about.

I would like to empty the recycle bin of the external drive when needed with Windows if possible and not use the third party program.

 

How to empty external drive using recycle bin on Windows 10 computer.

If the drives have $Recycle.Bin folders (as would be expected given their size), then they
do have a recycle bin obviously. The way you access the recycle bin of the external drive is the exact same way you access the recycle bin for your system. So let me repeat - the UI is
one and the same. The recycle bin icon on your desktop if double-clicked will open and show you files deleted both from internal as well as external drives.

If your recycle bin doesn't show files deleted from external drives, that means their recycle bin folders have got disconnected or unlinked from the system's recycle bin. I also provided a couple of solutions for that.

 

First off what are the files? The other is that they could be just leftovers from when the OS never deleted them the last time, or it was not properly ejected, so the files stay in the bin.

If you do not need them, just delete them and move on. No need to disect the process and play 20 guesses with yourself why they showed up when the OS saw that you plugged in the device. Weirder things have happened.

 

Each partition contains a hidden system folder $RECYCLE.BIN which "contains" the deleted files for that partition before they are permanently deleted. These folders for each partition are virtually aggregated to make the contents of the Recycle Bin.

 

Thanks for the replies.
One of the files was an old Windows iso installation file which was quite large.
Just inserted the external drive again and emptied the Recycle bin and everything is fine.
Cheers!