T O P
Office365PowershellSystem Administrator

Easily Enable Active Directory Recycle Bin in Windows Server 2012 R2

I recently enabled Azure Active Directory (AD) Connect and wanted to turn this feature on. After doing some reading, I found a simple way to enable the AD Recycle Bin.

  1. In the management console, go to Tools > Active Directory Administrative Center
  2. Select Local Domain and in the Tasks Pane
  3. Select Enable Recycle Bin.
  4. Click OK

    NOTE: Be aware this feature cannot be disabled.

  5. Click OK.  Once enabled, wait for AD replication to complete as this is a change made on the configuration partition. This process may take a while should your organization have a large active directory infrastructure.

A very simple enablement of a process that could save you hours of restore time.  Again, this process cannot be reversed once invoked.

PowershellSystem Administrator

Empty the Recycle Bin for All Users with Powershell

On a new client’s server, I ran into an issue where a drive was running low on space and I found that another user account on the server (which had been deleted) had files in the Recycle Bin!

Thankfully, I found this Powershell command which worked to delete the files. All you have to do is open a Powershell console as admin and run the following command:

Get-ChildItem “C:`$Recycle.bin\” -Force | Remove-Item -Recurse -force

You can append -Whatif to do a test run and see what files will be deleted before actually deleting them.