Yes, I should have said “move” instead of “copy” – my mistake. A Windows move is like the PDP RENAME – only a directory entry. Thanks for correcting that.
Apparently my memories of Windows are worse and more rose-colored than I realized.
How does one access this recycle folder?
You don’t, because, as Musicat pointed out, “deleting” a file doesn’t do anything to the file itself. The ones and zeroes making up the file still sit on the same position on the hard disk as before. The only thing that is changed is the directory entry, which now labels the file as being in the recycling bin rather than its previous path in the folders.
When you then empty the recycling bin, there is still nothing that happens to those ones and zeroes either. The only thing that changes is the directory entry, which now labels the hard disk sectors taken up by the file (which don’t need to be contiguous) as available for reuse. But that doesn’t mean it is reused (i.e., other ones and zeroes are written onto it) straightaway; depending on how much you move your data around, and where on the hard disk your system sends newly stored data, these sectors may continue to be occupied by the supposedly deleted file for a long time.
The little desktop icon not good enough?
It should be called something like $Recycle.Bin or RECYCLER
You go to the Recycle Bin. It will show you every file that’s currently linked there. If you want to access a file in this folder, hit the restore function for it and that will restore the normal links to that file.
Even after you ‘empty’ the bin? How does that work?
There is no secondary, didn’t-really-mean-it, bin with your files in it after you empty the Recycle Bin. If nothing shows up when you open up the bin on your desktop, it’s basically gone.
The recycler folder we’re talking about is the Recycle Bin.
Once you empty the bin, the links are gone and there’s no regular way to access those files.
Back to the topic of files reappearing, it is most likely a corrupted Recycle Bin. This article has instructions on how to easily reset it. Note that it will empty everything from your bin as part of the process, so make sure you don’t want to recover anything from it first.
Nitpick: Much or most of the file probably hasn’t been overwritten yet. IIRC, Whats-his-name Norton might have been able to get some of it back even decades ago.
Nah. If you recently emptied the bin (which means the links to the files have been removed) and haven’t loaded much data onto that machine since, then chances are very good that the hard disk sectors on which the file was stored haven’t been re-written in the meantime. Off-the-shelf recovery software should be able to locate and restore it.
I am well aware of how file systems work. All file systems in use today handle file deletion in the same fundamental way.
No, that is BS and nothing more than uninformed Windows bashing, and shows you are conflating the operating system and the file system. All file systems which have ever supported a version of Windows allow files to be moved by altering the file table and not by physically duplicating bytes on the storage device, and all version of Windows have used that facility to move files instead of making temporary copies of them.
Linux file systems handle file deletion and moves in the same fundamental way. What you are refusing to get is that the Recycle Bin is a Windows shell concept. It has nothing to do with how any Windows file system or OS has ever handled the deletion of files from disk, and nothing to do with how either FAT32 or NTFS handles file deletion. Again, only Windows Explorer and the GUI APIs use the Recycle Bin. A file deleted by Windows itself, or application software directly calling the Windows API, does not use the Recycle Bin. You can tell because things like application temporary files, files replaced via application updates, or files deleted through the command-line interface do not go through the Recycle Bin. If the Recycle Bin was a fundamental part of file deletion from Windows file systems you would see all deleted files inside it. It is simply a convenience implemented under the hood by nothing more complicated than a special hidden directory.
A Recycle Bin is also not a Windows-only concept. Mac OS had an equivalent called the Trash since its introduction, and various Linux graphical environments implement one as well. They all work in the same fundamental way, by moving files to a specially designated directory hidden from normal view until the user commands them to be deleted from disk and by providing an API to software to use it so the software itself does not have to move the files into the designated directory or figure out where it is.
It’s very clear you have no particular knowledge of how Windows works and are deciding it must work in dumb ways out of your personal distaste of it, and that is not OK for answering factual questions about it.
The Recycle Bin folder is in various locations depending on the version of Windows. If it is the Win9x lineage, it is a hidden folder named RECYCLER at the root of a drive with it enabled. In the Windows NT lineage, it is called $Recycle.Bin in the same location. Windows NT-based systems (all modern Windows) additionally place special permissions on the Recycle Bin folder to prevent access to it outside of the normal Recycle Bin interface, both to protect how it works and prevent users of the system from snooping on others’ deleted files. These can be overridden to let you enter the directory through the shell but that is not recommended. Just like any other deleted file, the data of files “emptied” (deleted) from the Recycle Bin may still exist on the disk but unindexed and may be recoverable by data recovery software. A file inside the Recycle Bin should not be said to be deleted at all.