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So about a month ago, I deleted about 40GBs worth of files to my recycle bin and then emptied recycle bin. My system is running on a SSD and it’s 220GB in size.

Today, I had to resort to downloading a data recovery software due to my stupidity. I noticed that all 40 GB was still located in $recycle.bin as well as everything I have deleted since then.

Now, I know it takes a while for files to be overwritten on SSD’s, but I do write quite a lot to my SSD, and TRIM has ran since then. Is this normal behaviour, or is there a problem with my $recycle.bin file?

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    Welcome to the community! This is a decent question, but please be sure to look at the edits that were made to this piece. Specifically, the title of the question should be the question; no a simple “Why is this happening?” which is pretty vague. Dec 12, 2018 at 14:51
  • I noticed that all 40 GB was still located in $recycle.bin... Did you see this in the data recovery software? If so, what leads you to conclude this recoverable data is consuming space on your drive? Dec 12, 2018 at 15:02

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Sounds like you got lucky - always have backups :)

So of the 220GB drive, 40GB has been deleted, meaning there's still 180GB 'spare'. Even if we allocate 60GB to 'OS stuff', there's another 60GB of unused, 'untouched' space on the SSD.

Due to wear-levelling and other clever technologies, the drive will attempt to write evenly over the cells rather than re-writing constantly in any one part of the drive to prolong it's life. This is why your files are still there - you hadn't done enough writes on the drive to start overwriting those old files yet.

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  • that was my first thought, as I know ssds tries to not overwrite existing data as much as it can. But my drive has been running at close to full capacity since deleting the files.
    – Jamie
    Dec 12, 2018 at 15:04
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The recycle bin is unrelated to SSD space management.

It's just a special folder that "deleted" files get moved to, with an understanding that the OS is allowed to permanently delete them after a while or when space runs out, usually after asking the user in a dialog.

That hasn't happened, so the files were still there, and from the file system's perspective the blocks were still in use, so the SSD was never instructed to discard them.

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