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Offline fohat.digs

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Windows 7 file system frustration question
« on: Sat, 17 January 2015, 12:42:41 »
I am having trouble copying a file onto an external hard drive for archiving.

There are several previous "My Documents" folders that I want to consolidate onto a single hard drive.

I have given them names such as "My Documents 20130724" but now when I try to copy them to the drive, I get a message like: "Do you want to replace the existing "Documents" folder with the new "Documents" folder?"

Windows is acting like it will ignore my renamings and consider all the folders to be the same. This is clearly something new, because I already have 4 of them there, in the same folder, with names like "My Documents 20110322" or similar.

I am I missing something, have I forgotten something, or has something changed?

Thanks
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Offline heedpantsnow

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Re: Windows 7 file system frustration question
« Reply #1 on: Sat, 17 January 2015, 14:00:17 »
You might want to change the special Documents folder in windows to another directory before you move it off?  That's the only thing I can think of that would interfere.
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Offline SpAmRaY

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Re: Windows 7 file system frustration question
« Reply #2 on: Sat, 17 January 2015, 14:13:56 »
A quick and dirty work around would be to open the folder and just copy contents to new folder on new drive.
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Offline rowdy

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Re: Windows 7 file system frustration question
« Reply #3 on: Sat, 17 January 2015, 19:25:28 »
I think Windows puts a "desktop.ini" "hidden" file in that directory with the GUID or something to identify this as a special Windows folder.

The folders on the external drive probably have the same "hidden" file in there.

You might even see a special icon for the directories.
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Offline Coreda

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Re: Windows 7 file system frustration question
« Reply #4 on: Sat, 17 January 2015, 19:32:04 »
Windows gets funny with the Documents renaming. I recently changed the name of the default Documents folder to 'Honeypot' to let it sit and collect all the random crap that gets installed to it, while creating a new folder called 'Documents' with the proper contents. Windows didn't properly change the original name until moving the linked Location several times.

I'd say rowdy is right, and it's probably best to just copy the files over.
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Offline fohat.digs

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Re: Windows 7 file system frustration question
« Reply #5 on: Sat, 17 January 2015, 19:37:45 »
Quote from: Coreda on Sat, 17 January 2015, 19:32:04

Windows gets funny with the Documents renaming.


Thanks. I was not going to touch the "real" Documents (aka My Documents, what is that about?) folder, I am just shuffling old ones around from external hard drives.
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That's the message. That's the whole message. Say that every day, not just to reach America's frustrated young white men, but people of every age, race, and gender.
Late-stage capitalism is a wealth-concentration engine, focused on vacuuming up every dollar and putting it in as few hands as possible. Republicans are helping that vacuum suck.
How does a tiny fraction of the population get away with this? They do it by dividing the other 99% of Americans against themselves."
- Marc Sumner 2025-05-30

Offline godly_music

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Re: Windows 7 file system frustration question
« Reply #6 on: Sun, 18 January 2015, 19:54:54 »
Another quick (and reasonable) solution would be to compress those various folders into archives. Windows don't give no damn about archives. And since these are backups you might wanna do that at some point, anyway.
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