With SharePoint User recycle bin, there is no way to ‘Empty’ the recycle bin in a single go. We have this option in Site Collection Recycle Bin. May be this is done deliberately to prevent users from deleting all items by accident! This is definitely a fallback from developers perspective.
I quickly found a way to Empty your recycle bin without going through the pain manually deleting each of the files or selecting the files and clicking on the ‘Delete Items’ button.
- Open your SharePoint Recycle Bin Page by clicking on the Recycle Bin icon on the left navigation bar.
- Simply copy the below JavaScript statement into the address bar and click Enter.
javascript:emptyItems();
Note: Be careful as all of the items will not to sent to Site Collection Recycle Bin. I reckon this a good tip for development phase.
Strange the Sharepoint users seem to accept any sillly “feature” of the product.
Comment by portaleco — March 17, 2008 @ 8:01 pm
[...] Empty SharePoint User Recycle Bin [...]
Pingback by SharePoint, SharePoint and stuff : SharePoint Kaffeetasse #51 — April 1, 2008 @ 7:44 am
Excellent post, thanks very much. We are in the process of going live with our SharePoint server and have found this slightly annoying!
During testing we have deleted some files from a Document library that have totalled 20Gb in size. When they go to the second level recycle bin and we tick them and ask SharePoint to permanently delete these files it takes about 1 hour to remove them. The biggest issue is that whilst this is being done nobody can access SharePoint :>( Do you have any ideas abou tthis one?
Comment by Craig Holt — May 23, 2008 @ 12:01 am
Saved me some hours on a box where I don’t have Site Collection rights. How clever to think about the parts instead of the interface! thx.
Comment by Henry — September 23, 2008 @ 4:57 am
Wow, thanks! I had 120,000 deleted list items that had to go… this did the trick!
Comment by Devin Walker — October 14, 2008 @ 4:09 am
Cant belive it worked. Wonderful suggestion. Thanks a lot dude.
Comment by DG G — March 18, 2009 @ 9:54 pm
Never thought of that! Thanks!
Comment by Wes — May 21, 2009 @ 2:17 am
Nice tip, thank you.
Comment by Harish Mathanan — August 7, 2009 @ 3:39 pm
Greatly appreciated – this may postpone some gray hairs.
Comment by J Gambill — August 28, 2009 @ 6:50 am
Great to see it worked for you. Thanks for reading my blog.
Comment by Jag — August 28, 2009 @ 10:54 am
I had several thousand items in the recycle bin, and this saved me a lot of time. It is much easier than enumerating through all the files via .NET code. Thanks a million!!
Comment by Eric — October 15, 2009 @ 7:11 am
Excellent it worked! I was clicking through each page, and deleting 50 at a time, this saved me 10 minutes of boredom!!
Comment by Richard — October 16, 2009 @ 7:49 pm