I copied almost 100GB of files from my laptop to my external drive using the following xcopy command.
X:\windows\system32>XCOPY E:\ "L:\BackupFolder\" /S /EAll the files in E: were copied to BackupFolder but now I cannot see the backup folder in my external drive. But I can see the space taken by that copy. I don't know where the copied files have gone.
They must be there in the external drive, but I can neither see nor access them. I even tried showing hidden files and folders but it didn't help me.
I can however see the copied folders and files when I do dir /a from the command prompt.
Has anybody experienced this problem? How can I find and access the copied backup files?
85 Answers
When specifying an entire drive as source, also add source wildcard. Example:
xcopy "S:\*.*" "D:\destdirectory" /D /E /C /R /I /K /Ythen the H and S attributes are not set in the destination.
Your files are being copied but the destination files have been set as protected system files. Showing hidden files will not show you protected system files, this is a separate option under view, alternately you can type the directory path into the address bar and you will be able to see your files.
I faced a similar issue when using xcopy.
The folder has been set as system file and has become hidden from Windows Explorer
To unhide the folder, run this command:
attrib -s -h D:\hiddenfoldername
Reference:
I have run into the same issue when using Robocopy. I don't know why, but the target folder gets marked as both hidden and a system folder. You can see if if you go to the parent folder and run
dir /ahs
To un-hide it, run
attrib /d /s -s -h foldername
I have a similar/related issue. User files on old pc are visible and usable. Attempting to copy all my documents files to a USB drive and copy then to a new windows 10 pc (from Win7), the files are not visible. I even pulled the hard drive out of the win 7 pc and tethered it to a usb interface, plugged it into the win10 machine, and under the users folder the User/subfolder Bill (his win7 username) was not visible.
Pulled his Macrium Reflect backup from USB drive, hosted it on new machine, browsed the backup file, same thing. I can only see Public, not the user itself. Short of emailing about 5Gb from old pc to new, any suggestions are welcome.
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