I don’t fucking know why I can’t eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don’t know who’s lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.
I take it you don’t filesystem much do you?
Moving a file is literally just changing a pointer in the filesystem table to basically say ‘hey, these file contents are now stored in this other folder’. Moving a file on the same drive literally never requires rewriting the actual file contents.
I’m practically certain that what’s slowing Windows down when sending something to the Recycle Bin is the background processing and data compression being performed by System Restore.
I take it you don’t Windows much?
Windows moves the file from its current folder to the hidden system folder C:\$Recycle.Bin\. That involves copying file metadata, updating NTFS records, and possibly moving the file across volumes (which becomes a full file copy+delete).
Large files or folders with many entries take longer because NTFS has to record each move, update security descriptors, and maintain the Recycle Bin’s index.
If the file is on another drive than the C-drive, the system literally copies it into that drive’s recycle bin folder, then deletes the original.
Nobody said Windows did this stuff efficiently.
Windows doesn’t do any recycle bin data compression. And System Restore is a completely separate, unrelated system. So no it doesn’t do any of that.
I didn’t say the Recycle Bin does any data compression, I said System Restore does data compression, and this is indeed a known fact.
Sure, but neither is relevant to the recycle bin.
Windows has some other features hiding behind the scenes and bogging the system down when files get changed, like Restore Previous Versions…
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/backup-and-restore-with-file-history-7bf065bf-f1ea-0a78-c1cf-7dcf51cc8bfc
I do believe that feature is closely tied with System Restore as well…
What? File History is a completely different system. System Restore makes occasional restoration points and is enabled by default, File History needs to be set up to use it. It’s disabled by default and Microsoft seems to be actively trying to hide it (try finding it in the Win11 settings screen; you won’t find it there) so people use OneDrive to back their stuff up instead.
Coming from Windows 2003, Vista Ultimate and 7 Ultimate era, Restore Previous Versions was enabled by default, and was a side service of System Restore…
Right I get what you mean now. “File History” =/= “Previous Versions”. But “Previous Versions” has been entirely replaced since Win8, so not entirely relevant.
It’s also completely unrelated to file deletions, because the VSS system both System Restore and Previous Versions use worked on the block-level, and as you already pointed out blocks aren’t written to when a file is deleted, it either gets copied over to the recycle bin or just marked as deleted, but neither affect the block contents (VSS works on a CoW principle, blocks are backed up only if written to, but live performance is basically unaffected by this unless you’re doing huge loads like big DB modifications or something.