SharePoint Recycle Bin

Question

Is recycle bin a list? And can we query recycle bin to get items deleted from a list,if so how to do it? And also where is the recycle bin data actually stored, is it stored in the content db ?

Answer 1

No, Recyle bin is not a List like other document library and lists. Yes you can Query Recyle Bin item like SPWeb.GetRecycleBinItems Method

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spweb.getrecyclebinitems(v=office.12).aspx

All files are internally stored in Content DB in Sharepoint. Once it is Deleted permanently from Sharepoint, they it will be deleted from Content DB.

Answer 2

No it is not a list, it's work on the same concept as we have in windows.

yes you can access it via powershell or other ways. here is powershell example.

# recycle bin's are tied to a site collection so we need a site collection object

$site = get-spsite http://www.yoururl.com

#we can see everything in the recycle bin like this:
$site.Recyclebin

#unfortunately, the above command dumps quite a lot to the screen.
#fortunately, we can pipe the output to other commands for filtering and cleanup.

#This command will return all the webs in the recyclebin
$site.Recyclebin | where {$_.itemtype -eq "web"}

#we can build on this by adding a sort statement, 
#here I sort by dirname, which is the URL path the item would have been at before it was deleted
$site.Recyclebin | where {$_.itemtype -eq "web"} | sort dirname

# we can format the output into a nice list
$site.Recyclebin | where {$_.itemtype -eq "web"} | sort dirname | select title, itemtype, dirname, itemstate

#note that in the above listing, itemstate shows which recycle bin it's in (FirstStageRecyclebin = End user Recycle Bin Items, SecondStageRecycleBin = Deleted from end user Recycle Bin)

#here's one more application of filtering to show everything that's not a page nor a list item

$site.RecycleBin | where { $_.itemtype -ne "file" -and $_.itemtype -ne "ListItem" } | sort dirname | select title, itemtype, dirname

In SharePoint everything stored into the Content Database, So all deleted items stored into the Content DB until permanently deleted from recycle bin.