After Robocopy-Directory / Files is not displayed on the external drive

Question

I gladly used robocopy to back up my computers to an external USB drive. This is great as it only copies files that have been changed / updated / new. I can take an external drive to any machine and look at it like on another drive on a computer.

I recently bought 750 g and another 1 TB of external hard drives. Over the weekend, I launched robocopy, which copied about 500 g to my external drive. After copying, My computer shows that ~ 500 is used on the external drive. The strange thing is that when I click on the drive in Windows Explorer, nothing is displayed on the right pane of Windows Explorer (and the + icon goes off in the left pane). I copied one file (drag-and-drop) to this disk and appeared in Windows Explorer. The command line shows the same thing. 1 file.

I know that the files are on the disk, as it appears when the free space has been reduced.

I read that I have to make sure that simple file sharing is turned off, and it is. I also owned the files as Administrator. Nothing yet. It works the same on my WIndows XP machine and my Windows 7 Ultimate.

Has anyone else seen this? Or even better, does anyone know what I'm doing wrong or how to solve this problem?

thanks! Bill44077

Answer 1

Just stumbled upon this problem myself, so that might be a late answer, and you may have already worked on it, but for those who stumbled upon this page here, my solution ... The problem is that for some reason Because of this, Robocopy marked the directory with the System attribute, which makes it invisible in the directory structure if you do not enable the viewing of system files. The easiest way to resolve this is through the command line. Open a command prompt and change focus to the appropriate drive (for example, x :), then use the [dir / A: S] command to display all directories with the System attribute set. Find the name of your directory and enter the command [ATTRIB -R -S x: \ MyBackup / S / D], where x: \ is the drive letter, and MyBackup is the name of your directory, / S skips subfolders and / D folder processes. This should clear the Read-Only and System attributes in all directories and files, allowing you to normally view the directory.

Answer 2

In my case, the above did not work.

This worked: attrib -h -s -a [ Drive : ][ Path ] .

For example: attrib -h -s -a "C:\My hidden folder" .

Answer 3

You can try this, I can say, because all of Windows 10 has all the unpleasant flaws, I have lost confidence in Windows 10 and Microsoft.

Well, I found that after I robocopied the entire Documents folder in the root directory of the external drive, I got a folder that is not called Documents, but the Documents folder has been renamed and translated into my native language, so this may be a language issue. (the / XD option tells robocopy to skip the folder)

 C:\users\asdf\documents >robocopy . f:\ManuBackup /XD c:\Users\Asdf\Documents\OneDrive /s 

Explorer shows Tiedostot-name (= Documents in Finnish) and Command Prompt shows ManuBackup-name. I also tried all attrib.exe commands in the ManuBackup folder, I do not trust me 100%