You may recall that I blogged about my happy discovery of the Restore Selection feature of the SharePoint recycle bin earlier this month.  I ended that post by cautioning users that, "per the instructions, you can ‘Use this page to restore items that users have deleted from this site or to empty deleted items. Items that were deleted more than 30 day(s) ago will be automatically emptied.'"

Since I learned a little more about the recycle bin when I attended Mindsharp's Power End User training, I wanted to revisit the topic and share the additional information that I acquired.  While the above quote is indeed true, as far as it goes, it's not the whole truth.  The whole truth is that the 30-day limitation is the default time limit for recovering items from the recycle bin.  As it turns out, as with so many SharePoint features, that 30-day limitation is actually configurable, so you can change it to suit your needs.

Well, I say you can change it, but what I really mean is that your site administrator can change it (and very well may do so, provided you have a reasonable business justification for doing so, and provided you ask politely).  I have verified this admin-only superpower in a (semi-) scientific manner by searching for the means to alter that 30-day setting within the Bamboo portal, and I don't see the slightest means to do so.  As such, I have arrived at my conclusion that since I'm not an administrator on our portal, this particular aspect of site configuration is not available to me as a lowly end user.  Even a power end user doesn't trump a site administrator, friends!

Oh, and one other additional item on this topic that I learned in Mindsharp training: You know that 30-day (or whatever it's been reset to) window that you have before a recycled item is automatically removed from the site?  Once that item is automatically removed from the site, it is gone, baby, gone ... even your site administrator won't be able to retrieve an item once that window has come and gone, so I'd suggest that you might want to get in the habit of checking your recycle bin every now and again.