Windows 10: Recycle Bin(s) on External Hard Drives show Local Hard Drive Recycle

Greetings group.
I have a 2 month old hard drive that failed on my desktop PC, taking My Documents with 7 years worth of data. I had just moved the folder to the new drive and hadn't gotten a chance to backup yet.
I'm trying to check Recycle bins on my External hard drives to see if I ever had even a partial Documents folder on one of them..
Problem: All 3 of my external hard drives have multiple recycle bins. All of the recycle bins show the same content as my local C Drive on my laptop. I am attaching 2 screenshots for your review. One shot is of the recycle bins on external drive, the other shot is a screenshot of the recycle bins on my C drive on laptop.
I'm logged in as Administrator because my normal login cannot access any of these recycle bins. And my normal login is in the Admin group. Using Windows Explorer as Administrator, I'm unable to see the Recycle bins. I can see them with my regular login. Very odd.

I'm so desperate for help. Any ideas appreciated. *Think

Thanks for any help.

:)

 

How to recover deleted file in the Recycle bin in my external hard drive

Hello everyone,

I deleted a lot of files from my external hard drive. All of them when to the recycle bin of my external hard drive.

I used a laptop on windows 10 to delete of this files and I could see them in the recycle bin.

Now I am connecting my external hard drive to another laptop (I only travel with my hard drive) and the recycle bin of my hard drive is empty. I have not empty it how did it happen?

I have shown hidden file on my hard drive and I can see there are few folder in the recycle bin but they are empty 0 bytes. What happen? how can i see my deleted files again.

Thanks

 

Where is recycle bin actually stored?

It's the same on Windows NT/2000 all the way up to XP/Vista/7/8/10.

When you delete a file on an external drive, it won't move the file to your internal drive (it won't move it to the
C:\$Recycle.Bin folder). But if you've enabled recycling on the external drive, it should move to the $Recycle.Bin folder on the external drive itself (so something like
F:\$Recycle.Bin for example). When you open your recycle bin icon, it should list files in the recycling folder of every connected hard drive (all in one combined view/list).

You can decide if recycling is allowed on an external drive by right-clicking your Recycle Bin and choosing Properties.

If it's setup to recycle on that drive but still not showing up in the recycle bin, I'd go ahead and reset the Recycle Bin (same instructions as linked above, just do it on your external drive).