Windows Tip: Disk quotas and the recycle bin

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As a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), I frequently get half a dozen or more questions from users each week. Typically, someone will have read some article I've written somewhere and will approach me with an issue they're having with their Windows network that relates somewhat to the topic of the article. My response is generally to answer the question if I can or suggest they post their question to an appropriate Microsoft public newsgroup if I can't immediately answer their question.

Once such question I received this weekend related to an article I wrote for O'Reilly's WindowsDevCenter site awhile back. The article was titled The Well-Tuned Server, Part 1. The article dealt with implementing disk quotas in corporate environments, and under the heading Quota Gotchas, I made this suggestion:

"Here's a common scenario: A user has 25 MB of files on a quota-enabled volume, tries to free up space by deleting 5 MB of old files, checks the volume in My Computer and it still shows 25 MB of files, and calls Support to complain that something doesn't work. The problem? When the user deleted his files, they were simply moved to the Recycle Bin on the quota-enabled volume. The solution: educate users to either empty their Recycle Bin, hard-delete files using SHIFT+DELETE, or run Disk Cleanup."

The reader who contacted me said that this solution just wasn't working in his environment because his users seemed to have other priorities than paying attention to policies like this, and the result was that his Help Desk kept getting calls from users saying that deleting wasn't working anymore on their computers. The reader asked if I had a solution and yes there is one: use Group Policy to disable Recycle Bin functionality on a per-user basis as needed. The policy for doing this is User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Windows Explorer \ Do Not Move Deleted Files To The Recycle Bin. If you enable this policy, the confirmation message received by users targeted by the GPO changes from "Are you sure you want to send foo.doc to the Recycle Bin?" to "Are you sure you want to delete foo.doc?" In other words, files that users try to delete will now be permanently deleted instead of being sent to the Recycle Bin.

This solution resolves the quota issue described above, but like any contemplated change to your network configuration you should carefully think it through first and decide whether the problem it solves is more important than the problem it creates i.e. users will no longer be able to restore files they accidentally delete. Will implementing this solution result in fewer Help Desk calls, or will it instead cause an increase in Help Desk calls like "Oops, I accidentally deleted my report, can you please restore it from backup?"

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