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How to Manage SharePoint Recycle Bins

Compost Bin

Deleting Items in SharePoint

Have you ever wondered what happens when you delete material from your SharePoint? Well, it’s simple! Once deleted, documents or list items go to the Recycle Bin. That is exactly what would happen if you delete a file on your desktop.
Unlike Windows OS, deleted SharePoint documents go through two stages of deletion: the Site level and the Site Collectio. Each of these stages has their own Recycle Bins, and they have different impact on your storage usage.
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Site Recycle Bin & Site Collection Recycle Bin

When you delete a document, it first goes to the Site Recycle Bin. Deleted documents from a particular site will stay in the Site Recycle Bin for a predetermined period before being purged from the server. All the documents stored in the Recycle Bin counts against your site collection’s storage quota. This means, Be careful about keeping too many documents in the Recycle bin.
You can conveniently set the duration which you want to retain a document in the Recycle Bin. You can do this in the Central Administration Recycle Bin settings. Default duration is 30 days. Within that period, the user can choose to restore the item, or permanently delete it.
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When you permanently delete an item from the Site Recycle Bin, it’s sent to the Site Collection Recycle Bin until purged after a set period. The amount of time an item will stay depends on how much time it spent in the Site Recycle Bin.

How Retention and Data Quota Are Managed

If the Recycle Bin retention is set to the default 30 days, and an item has spent 20 days in the Site Recycle Bin, then the item will stay in the Site Collection Recycle Bin for 10 days before being purged from the server permanently.
It is also worth noting that the data stored in your Site Collection Recycle Bin does not count against your site collection storage quota; instead, SharePoint allocates additional space for the Recycle Bin. By default, the additional space is 50% of the site-collection storage quota. Therefore, if your site collection has a storage quota of 100 GB, then, SharePoint will allocate 50 GB of storage to the Recycle Bin, for a total of 150 GB required in your content database.
Now you know it! Keep this in mind when you are planning for storage servers for SharePoint. If you want to know more about SharePoint data storage, just ask us!

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