$Recycle bin and Undo operations

This week Phil Moore made an excellent finding (link here), one that most of us have seen for years but not investigated. Those $I files that seem orphaned/abandoned without explanation now have one. Phil notes that every time a file/folder is deleted and then restored, the $I file stays behind in the recycle bin. This post is about some follow up testing and results.

I did some quick tests - deleting and restoring files in a few different ways testing $I & $R file creation every time. I'm not even looking at indexes or timestamps, just file creation/deletion. My testing was on Windows 10 (32bit) version 10.0.10586.106

I'm not reproducing all the output here, but only the summary. Here are a few ways to send files to the recycle bin. Remember you cannot do any operations using the command line (as that operates directly at the file system level and does not use the recycle bin abstraction).

First we delete a file (right-click and select Delete). Let's try to restore now using any one of the following ways:

1. Right-click the file, click Restore on file in the recycle bin
2. Cut file from recycle bin and Paste elsewhere
3. Drag the file from recycle bin and into another folder
4. Undo the last operation using Ctrl-Z  OR  right-click & select Undo Delete


Only the 4th method (Undo Delete) results in deletion of the $I file. The other methods leave it behind.

I believe this to be a windows bug. Interestingly, when you Restore a file from the bin (right-click & Restore), then right-click on the desktop (or in any folder), the context menu has an new item called 'Undo Move'. It does NOT say 'Redo Delete'. For every other action, you will see a 'Redo ACTION' in the menu (see figure 2). So I believe when you restore a file, windows just performs a file move (on the $R file) and thus marked it as a move in the last performed action. 

Figure 1 - 'Undo Move' seen after restoring file

Now, clicking on the Undo Move will result in sending the file back to the recycle bin but as a new $I & $R pair, as if it was an entirely new delete operation. 

Figure 2 - 'Redo Rename' seen after using 'Undo Rename' from an unrelated file rename operation

In figure 3 below, you can see multiple abandoned $I files after doing this multiple times (delete, then restore).

Figure 3 - Recycle bin folder after multiple deletes and restores showing abandoned $I files

Let us know (comments or twitter) if you know of more ways to delete/restore.