How does the second stage Recycle Bin work?

Question

In my site collection, the settings are set for "No Quota" and the Second Recycle Bin with "50%". How this combination works?

When the Recycle Bin overflow the 50%, how new itens will be stored on Recycle Bin?

Answer 1

If you have no quota setting for a site collection then their is no space limitation for 2nd stage recycle bin. This is bad practice if you have a site collection with No Quota.

I had the same problem, for some reason one of site collection settings changed from 20GB to No Quota. then we notice that Content DB size not matching the size of collections...after further investigation we found 2nd stage recycle bin stored 10GB of data at that time.

Keep in mind, 1st and 2nd stage recycle bin have the days of retention policy,w hich means after X number of days old files will be deleted.

Items remain in the second-stage Recycle Bin until a specified time period has been reached (the default setting is 30 days) or until the second-stage Recycle Bin reaches its size limit, at which time the oldest items are deleted. The time limit for the Recycle Bins applies to the total time after the item was initially deleted — not the time spent in either Recycle Bin stage.

When a second-stage Recycle Bin is enabled for a Web application, we recommend that you designate how much disk space is available to the second-stage Recycle Bin as a percentage of the quota allotted to the Web application. Items stored in the second-stage Recycle Bin do not count toward the site quota; however, the size that is specified for the second-stage Recycle Bin increases the total size of the site and the content database that hosts it. If no site quota has been set, there is no limit on the size of the second-stage Recycle Bin.

Plan to protect content by using recycle bins and versioning