Once you are finished, you'll have a separate recycle icon on the taskbar—useful for quick access to deleted files without having to hunt down an icon on your desktop, especially since Windows 7 ...

Both also apply to Windows: The space in the recycle bin is limited and “deleted” files can be restored without much effort. It therefore does not offer protection for confidential content.

We're focusing this guide on Windows 10, but these Recycle Bin settings have been available in the OS for a long time, which means that you can use the same instructions on Windows 8.1 and Windows 7.

You should know that by default, the Recycle Bin is set to occupy 10% of your hard drive. That means that if you have a 40-gigabyte hard drive, 4 GB are reserved for the Recycle Bin.