Administrators can enable or disable recycle bins for each content area and define their size quota. When you enable a recycle bin for a content area, content that is deleted from that area will be stored in a recycle bin in case it needs to be restored. If you do not enable a recycle bin for a content area, deleted content is removed permanently from the system.

Use Recycle Bin recycle bin setting for any content area is a long-running operation that is not executed immediately.

Convert Recycle Bins from Shared to Individual

Users, courses, and organizations content areas

When you enable recycle bins for the first time for user, course, or organization content areas, an individual recycle bin is created for each user, course, or organization.

When recycle bins were enabled for users, courses, or organizations content areas in Blackboard Learn releases before 9.1, a shared recycle bin was created. Administrators have the option to convert these shared recycle bins to individual recycle bins. When converted, the shared recycle bin is not deleted. Any existing content remains in the shared recycle bin, and all newly recycled content is placed in the individual recycle bins. Users with the appropriate permissions will still be able to access and restore files from the shared recycle bin. Administrators need to use existing capabilities to determine plans for moving or deleting that content. Once individual recycle bins have been enabled for a content area, it is not possible to revert to shared recycle bins.

Enable recycle bins

  1. On the Administrator Panel, under Content Management, select Content Area Management.
  2. Select Manage Recycle Bins.
  3. In the Use Recycle Bin field for the desired content area, select Yes.
  4. If enabling recycle bins for the institution or library content area, in the Default Quota field, select Unlimited or select Limited and type the desired quota limit. A value of "-1" indicates that no quota has been set for that recycle bin.

    The quota for the individual recycle bins in the users, courses, or organizations content areas is shared with the quota of the parent folder, which is set in Default Folder Creation Settings.

  5. Select Submit. Because this process does not complete immediately, in email is sent to administrators when settings changes are complete.

Disable recycle bins

When the recycle bin for a content area is disabled, any existing content will remain in the individual or shared recycle bins.

Even if recycle bins have been disabled for a content area, the scheduled purge of recycle bin files will continue to remove files that have passed their retention time in both shared and individual bins. To learn more about purge settings, see Configuring Recycle Bin Settings.

Institution and library content areas

When recycle bins are enabled for the institution or library content area, one shared recycle bin is created for each content area.