A customer was setting up a file server to which they intended to redirect all their employees’ documents. They were concerned about the amount of disk space used by all the Recycle Bins on that server.

Is there a fixed default size for the Recycle Bin, or is it based on the size of the disk? Is there a way we can change the default size for the Recycle Bin?

The customer is concerned that a user with a small quota on a large drive may end up filling their quota with Recycle Bin content and have no space left for their documents. For example, suppose you have a 1TB drive and each user has a 15 GB quota. If the Recycle Bin were based on disk size, and the Recycle Bin were set to use five percent of the disk, then that would give each user 5% × 1 TB = 51.2 GB of Recycle Bin, which is larger than their quota. Users can fill their Recycle Bin and have no room for documents! Fortunately, it doesn’t work that way. The Recycle Bin calculations are always based on the disk quota, not the disk size. In the above example, each user’s Recycle Bin would be 5% × 15 GB = 768 MB. Now as to what the default is, that’s a trickier question. Up through Windows XP, the default Recycle Bin was ten percent of the user’s quota on the underlying volume. Starting in Windows Vista, the algorithm was tweaked, and the default size is ten percent of the first 40 GB of quota, and five percent of any quota above 40 GB. (Note that future versions of Windows may tweak the defaults. This is provided for informational purposes, not contractual.)

If you don’t like the default, you can set an explicit maximum value by policy. If you are willing to live a little dangerously, you can dig under the covers and tweak values on a per-folder basis. Note that once you dig under the covers, you are in unsupported territory, so if it stops working (or starts misbehaving), then you’re on your own.