Recycle bin is empty in mounted backup
Hi,
For some reason, the recycle bin is completely empty when I mount my backup, located on an external drive, and open the "$RECYCLE.BIN" in the root of the partition (the main one, not the "System reserved").
The (relevant) settings I've used for my backup are:
- Disk mode
- Single version scheme
- No "sector-by-sector"
- Validation after backup is created
- Compression level: Max
- No exclusions
Is it possible I can get the files to show up, or should I decide to move the bin's content to a seperate folder before I do the backup.
Thanks in advance!
Hi, thanks for your response. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. I'm now in the process of recreating the backup with the settings I mentioned above, to be sure I did everything correctly.
My feeling though, is that this issue isn't related to permissions but to recycle bin folder pointing to the 'wrong' recycle bin, e.g. pointing to the recycle bin on the physical drive instead of the virtually mounted drive. I'll have a thorough look at it tomorrow.
OK, so it turns out that the recycle bin is not really empty, although to Windows Explorer it is.
When I open the recycle bin folder with a special tool like "XYplorer", I see the actual deleted files. In fact, there are also a bunch of extra files (mostly 1KB in size). They're all named like e.g. "$ROGZYW8". So it seems that the actual files are inside the recycle bin although you're not supposed to see them. It still appears that something is messed up with recycle bin references somewhere...
Any idea to what this means?
I'll check to see what happens on my system. Using Win 7 Ult, and images made by ABR11.5 I can explore the recycle bin and its' contents from a mounted image with no problems. I'll see what I get when I use 2013 on a 2013 image.
Recycle bin doesn't really hold any files, just pointers.
Before Vista, a file in the Recycle Bin is stored in its physical location and renamed as D[original drive letter of file][#]][original extension]. A hidden file called info2 or info stores the file's original path and original name in binary format. For Vista and W7 this metadata for each file is saved as $I[number].[original extension] and the original file is renamed to $R[number].[original extension].
So what you are seeing sounds right.
When you load a recycle bin under normal circumstances the original file name is shown but it's not until you restore the file that the file's name is changed back to its original name. The file, of course, never actually moves; it remains occupying the same sectors and clusters the whole time.
Thank you very much for your helpful response!
To be clear: Under normal circumstances, e.g. opening the bin on drive C, W7 still manages to display the $I.. and the $R.. pair as a supposedly normal file. In the case of mounting the backup, W7 is unable/unwilling to do this, resulting in my situation.
The crucial question is: Is there any way I can load the bin in the normal way without having to restore the whole backup? Or is there no other option other than moving the files to a seperate folder before the backup?
Even if you copy the recycle bin, it won't give yo the files because the "pointers' won't be pointing to the right clusters unless you rstore the whole drive. It might be possible to hunt down the clusters of the original files in the image/virtual partition but it would probably be easier to restore old image, restore files from the recycle bin, and then put the files in a safe place (on another hdisk) and restore the newer image and copy back the desired files from the safe place. It won't be fast but it's a relatively simple set of steps, if you have a spare drive to hold the data files once you restore them. And you can have a cup of coffee or make a meal while waiting for the restores to complete.
Since the recycle bin doesn't actually have the data files but is part of a 'system' to redirect by changing the metadata, it gets rather messy trying to pretend the recycle bin is just another directory. It's worse than using the virtual directories in w7 called libraries.
Scott, I'm not sure b ut I wonder if the image is mounted whether Window actual, picks up the recycle bin contents and temporarily adds them to the physical recycle metadata allowing a restore, except of coure they'd be returned to their original place in the mounted image.
I think if it was working that way, he'd see the deleted files as one normally does in a recycle bin. He's not seeing that. I too do not see that when I look in the recycle bin of a mounted image. I see the literal contents, not the virtual contents.
Thanks Scott. I see that you've assumed that I don't have access to the original drive anymore.. Luckily I still have :)
That it means it will only be a matter of restoring the files from the bin, before doing the backup.
Two side notes: Firstly, I'm suprised that AFAIK Acronis doesn't offer a setting or a prompt to restore files from the bin before doing the backup. If I'd already cleaned my PC, it would've required me to have spare HD to properly access those files. Secondly, are there any "hidden traps" besides the bin that require attention? Thanks again.
Restoring from Bin? Well, my suggestion was to have a backup (call it Fred) of your current drive, restore our old image and then use the reccyble bin to get back files and save them (let's call them Ethel) somewhere else because the next step is to restore Fred. After you restore Fred, yo can copy Ethel onto Fred and you're all set.
REgarding being warned that you have files in the bin when you make a backup. Hmmm. You have to draw a line somewhere. You do get the whole disk image and it will work if you restore it-- that's the fundamental goal. Besides, how much redundancy is enough? E.g., in LookOut, I mean OutLook, when you delete a msg (aka email) it goes to the the Deleted Items folder and if you delete it from there, it goes to the Recover Deleted folder and if you delete it from there, it goes to the diner down the street for an egg sandwich. ;)
Tip: always have a spare hdisk handy -- they are dirt cheap and you never know . . .
Hmm... perhaps I'm missing something but just to be sure you know:
I'm going to to clean install W7 after I've made the backup. Since I want a backup of the data present just before the backup, I don't need the data of the previous backups. So all the files I need, including the bin files will be on this backup. It's only a matter of restoring the bin files before the doing the backup in order to access them later easily on a mounted drive.
Dann,
I've been following this post, and I am a bit confused. As a course of general maintenance on my system, I routinely look through, and empty my recycle bin. I find it odd that you seem overly concerned about previously deleted files in the recycle bin. The fact that you have the ability to restore a backup and recover these files (even though it may take some extra work and/or an additional disk to retrieve them) seems to be all that is needed here. Are you keeping items in the recycle bin "just in case" you need them later? If so, you are putting them at risk leaving them in the recycle bin anyway. There are numerous programs and utilities (including Windows' own utilities) that can corrupt or delete the contents of the recycle bin. It is never good practice to depend on the recovery ablility of the recycle bin to store "just in case I need them" files.
Maybe I am missing something here.
James
Thanks for your reply James,
Well to be honest, normally I'd either delete or restore the bin items over time, but since I'm doing a backup anyway, I thought I might as well include them.
It's actually very simple. At first, I was under the assumption that the bin was more or less like any folder and I could access the bin later normally from the mounted drive. Now I understand that this requires a proper restore. Because of this, the fact that I want to at least keep my bin files, and the arguments you mentioned, I've come to conclusion that I might as well restore my files before doing the backup.
I hope this clears things up.
One last thing: If I set Acronis to backup all data sectors, does this mean that I'll still be able to recover (as in: http://www.piriform.com/recuva) files that have been deleted. It's not really crucial, but I was just wondering.
P.S. If you still think I sound overly concerned about data, that's probably because I am :P
James echoes my reaction as I've checked on this thread a few times. I truly don't understand why you need to access the recycle bin after a restore. If you might need those files, don't delete them or move them to the recycle bin.
Preserving contents of the recycle bin can't really be considered a prime concern of a backup tool such as ATI.
My experience with data recovery (forensic recovery software based, not hardware based) using Acronis True Image to back up a drive for recovery on a separate disk in the past, has shown the need to backup using sector-by-sector mode with "all" of the drive backed up (empty sectors included). When Windows deletes a file and you empty the recycle bin, Windows marks the space as free on the disk to allow overwriting. When using the sector-by-sector method to do a backup, you can choose to leave out the sectors marked as free (empty). If you were to restore this to a new drive, the ability to recover anything that possibly was contained in the sectors marked as free on the source drive during backup would not exist on the restored drive making recovery next to impossible.
James
Interesting, so "free" is what is marked as free instead of actually free. Well, I don't endless amounts of storage, so I'm probably going for the 'backup data sectors' method in any case.
Yes. It's always been that way (although it worked in various ways) in Windows. Deleting something doesn't actually delete the file, but instead marks that space as free or available. The "deleted" file itself may remain for quite a long time until the space is needed to write something else, or may be delete fairly soon if the drive is quite full.
You must have been thinking about egg sanwiches. :) certainly one doesn't want tobring bck everything in the recycle bin -- some files we really want to delete and keep deleted-- I'd say of the ones we delete. So how complicated do you want to make the program. at some point "delete" has to mean goodbye
My experience with data recovery (forensic recovery software based, not hardware based) using Acronis True Image to back up a drive for recovery on a separate disk in the past, has shown the need to backup using sector-by-sector mode with "all" of the drive backed up (empty sectors included). When Windows deletes a file and you empty the recycle bin, Windows marks the space as free on the disk to allow overwriting. When using the sector-by-sector method to do a backup, you can choose to leave out the sectors marked as free (empty). If you were to restore this to a new drive, the ability to recover anything that possibly was contained in the sectors marked as free on the source drive during backup would not exist on the restored drive making recovery next to impossible.
James
I don't think this is quite right. when a files goes into the wstebasket or recyclee or recyclebin, thesapce it uses is not marked free in the table--that doesn't happen until you empty the bin or,as the bin fills, the file gets pushed out (first in first out) to make room for a newly deleted file. So, if you back a disk and restore and the bin had files, you can still use the bin to bring back (undelete) those files.
Once a file is out if the bin, that's when you can recover it only if the space it contains, which is now marked free, hasn't been accessed/written to. This is could be done in some cases under DOS, where thete was no wastbasket or bin but the OS wasn't nearlly constantly writing to disk every time you touched a key. With newer OSs, recovering a file once it's out of the bin is impossible for most practical purposes.
The truth is, when you delete a file, the space isn't marked as free--in DOS, yes; in Windows, no.