I keep a rather large recycle bin on my Win 10 machine, but consider it a waste of space to have it backed up when I perform Image Based backups.

I can of course set my Image Based plan to exclude C:\$Recycle.Bin but how would Windows react if I then had to restore my backup image and there was no recycle bin? Would it be automatically created? Would Windows panic, not knowing what to do?

If it's not a good idea to exclude the recycle bin (or if you are not certain how Windows would react), is there any other way to exclude the *content* of the bin, though not the bin-folder itself?

Finally, are there any other standard Windows folders that I can safely exclude from an Image Based backup?