Today I needed to free up some disk space on my data partition, so I ran a scan using JDiskReport in order to map out which folders are taking up the most space, and I came across something peculiar. I found that the D:\$RECYCLE.BIN folder was taking up 50GB of space, even though the Recycle Bin appeared to be empty. Upon navigating into the D:\$RECYCLE.BIN folder in JDiskReport, I found that there were 3 different folders that were named for different user SID’s on the system. I didn’t bother to try and find out which users these SID’s belong to, or what was in the folders, but the remedy was simple. I just opened up a command prompt and ran the following command:
- rd /s D:\$RECYCLE.BIN
After confirming the action, the 50GB was returned to the free disk space and I was happy once again. Make sure to substitute the D: in the above command with whatever drive your Recycle Bin is taking up space on. Also note that this was done on Windows 7. I would assume the same command will work on Windows Vista but I have not confirmed it.
Now that the space has been cleared up, I’ve also reduced the amount of space the Recycle Bin can consume to 10GB. This is done by right-clicking the Recycle Bin on the Desktop, choosing Properties, and setting the size in MB.
