Where is the Recycle Bin on USB and How to Recover Data from it?

You can locate the Recycle Bin on the USB Flash drive. You might have encountered a similar issue. Many people practice backing up their data on a USB flash drive; you might have saved your important files, such as documents, photos, videos, Office files, audio files, etc.

You might end up deleting files from your USB flash drive for various reasons. If you ever wonder why the deleted files are not in the Recycle Bin or where deleted files from the USB drive go, you have landed on the perfect post.

Note: If you want to access the Bin folder on an external USB drive to recover deleted files. I suggest you not add any new files or update the existing data. This is to avoid overwriting and thereby increase the chances of recovering deleted files from a USB drive.

Where is the Recycle Bin on the USB drive?

Each USB flash drive has its own Recycle Bin, and locating it on a USB is never difficult. However, the Recycle Bin on a USB drive has different names based on its file system and the version of your Windows Operating System.

Following are the names of Recycle Bin depending on the USB file system:

• On FAT file systems, it’s \RECYCLED.
• On NTFS file systems, it’s \RECYCLER (excluding Windows Vista).
• On NTFS file systems on Windows Vista, it’s \$Recycle.Bin.

To enable the Recycle Bin feature on USB, one must change the Windows registry. As we all know, the registry is critical to the Windows Operating System.

How to Enable Recycle Bin on USB Flash drive on Windows 11 and other Versions?

• Go to Registry Editor by Running regedit and click on the OK. 

• Navigate to the Registry location HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer.

• Now right-click on it select the New tab and select DWORD 32-bit Value.
• Double-click the new key RecycleBinDrives (or right-click on it and select Modify), change the Value data to ffffffff (8 F’s), and then click OK.

• Every deleted file on the USB will now be routed to its own Recycle Bin. The USB itself determines the maximum size of your USB Recycle Bin. When you plug in a USB, you can also Restore those deleted data from the Recycle Bin.

How to Recover Deleted files from a USB drive, not in Recycle Bin?

Remo Recover is a powerful tool that can recover any deleted files from the USB not in Recycle BIn or any Shift+Delete files or if your files have been bypassed from the Recycle Bin.

It can recover more than 500 file formats, such as photos, videos, raw images, documents, audio files, PDFs, and Office files, from a USB drive. The tool works seamlessly even on corrupt or damaged USBs, SD cards, or other external storage devices.

Steps to Recover files from a USB drive using Remo Recover software

Step 1: Download and install Remo Recover on your computer. Connect the USB drive to your computer and follow the steps below to recover files from the USB drive.

Step 2: Select the drive from where you want to restore deleted files.

Step 3: Click on the Scan option to initiate the scanning process.

Note: Click on the Dynamic Tree View to view the recovered files.

Step 4:  Select the files you want to restore, and click on the Recover option to return the recovered files to the desired location.

Conclusion: 

The bin folder usually keeps deleted files for 30 days; later, they get deleted by themselves. Or the files get deleted until you empty them. If your files have been permanently deleted or bypassed from the Recycle Bin, you need to stop adding new data to your drive immediately. Adding new data might result in overwriting the drive. Hence, we recommend that you recover the data using Remo Recover.   

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About the Author: John Harris

With a decade of experience in data recovery, John Harris, Senior Editor at Remo Software, is your go-to specialist. His focus includes partition management, Windows solutions, and data troubleshooting, delivering insightful content that serves both users and search engines. John's expertise shines through in illuminating blog posts, untangling data loss intricacies across diverse storage platforms.…