The Recycle Bin feature within Windows has saved many a user throughout it’s existence. Sometimes we all can be a bit too hasty with our deletion impulse and it’s comforting to know there is a safety net below. With it’s day to day usage it does not take long for one glaring omission to surface – the recycle bin only protects deletions from files that reside on the local hard disk. If you have a network folder mounted to a drive letter on your PC, deletions from this drive by-pass the recycle bin and are effectively gone forever. Likewise, USB thumb drives suffer the same pitfall. Recovery then, at it’s best, is difficult and at it’s worst, impossible.

Enter iBin – a free portable utility that leverages AutoHotKey to replicate the recycle bin functionality for USB drives. The software requires no installation, simply download and extract the files to your thumb drive – or any USB device you wish to protect. The key requirement is to launch the application from the portable device itself – where it will then sit in your tray and intercept any deletion request with a confirmation prompt like below.

As the functionality requires the program to always be running in the background, it makes the most sense to leverage iBin using the Autorun command so that the launching is done more or less automatically and transparently. iBin includes a few tools to help configure this deployment – rather brilliant really.

Further, you can expect to have some controls over the allotted recycle bin container size as well as functionality to automatically purge the contents when they reach a certain age on the device.

iBin is an essential application for any and all USB driver users – the functionality is so critical you have to wonder how long before Microsoft expands it’s own offering as a result.

Download iBin