by Ken Task.
Recylebin exist for modules in courses. But not for section in courses or entire courses. So if course still exist, and recyclebin set to display all the time, one could go to course, click the recyclebin link and on resulting page force move to trashdir.
So getting control of it again might involve running the specific task related from command line ... over and over again ... while, at the same time, manually removing what ends up in moodledata/temp/backup/ as broken and moodledata/trashdir/.
'SoS', Ken