Disable The Recycle Bin In Vista
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Normally when you delete a file, it goes to the Recycle Bin. The convenient thing about this is that you can easily recover files that you have accidentally deleted. You can permanently delete the contents of the Recycle Bin using the Empty Recycle Bin option.
You can make a small change to the registry and tell Vista to bypass the Recycle Bin. This means that when you delete a file, it is gone and permanently lost (of course this is not the case if you are using recovery software).
To configure Vista to bypass the Recycle Bin, navigate to the following registry key within the Registry Editor:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\BitBucket.
Double click the NukeOnDelete option and set the value to 1.
Tags: vista, vista tips, windows vista
6 Comments
ARuffNeckBrotha
October 11th, 2007
at 5:09am
Disabling the Recycle Bin from within the registry might be a bit of an overkill. I mean who really wants to completely everything everytime and then have to depend on some 3rd party recovery tool when you realized that you might have inadvertently deleted an “importnant” file?
An alternative to completely disabling the Recycle Bin is just to disable it temporarily for specific delete operations. To accomplish this, just hold the SHIFT key down when deleting 1 or more files. Doing this will allow the user to bypass the Recycle Bin for that instance only. This a carryover from the Win95 era, and one of the few things that I am glad that kept with the advent of Vista.
Scott
October 11th, 2007
at 6:10am
I haven’t tried this yet in Vista, but in XP all you need to do is hold the shift key down when you hit delete and it’ll bypass the recycle bin too. This way, you still have that fall-back if you accidentally delete something using the normal method but when you really and truly want it gone, just hold the shift key.
Mark
April 13th, 2008
at 7:40am
I just checked and that registry key does not exist on my Vista system.
Harlan Carvey
April 17th, 2008
at 5:00pm
Do you have any documentation or a credible resource for this info? There’s no available info on MSDN or TechNet with regards to this functionality on XP…and definitely none for Vista…
Harlan Carvey
April 20th, 2008
at 6:13am
Further analysis and contact w/ MS clearly shows that for Vista, this Registry key is no longer effective. For Vista, MS moved to a per-user, per-volume model for the BitBucket key, and hence the NukeOnDelete value.
Again, the following statement is incorrect:
“To configure Vista to bypass the Recycle Bin, navigate to the following registry key within the Registry Editor:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\BitBucket”
A quick test…set the value, reboot…clearly showed that this setting has no effect whatsoever.
Forrest
June 20th, 2008
at 1:51pm
Has anybody actually tried this in Vista? I’m working on some file-based software, and to test it, I need to create huge numbers of files. To test a second time, I need to delete them, create a new suite, and try again. I’m routinely purging one to two million files at a time from the recycle bin, and it’s taking ages.
When I hit the delete key, I get the results I expect. When I hold down shift while hitting delete, nothing happens…?