After Robocopy, the copied Directory and Files are not visible on the destination Drive

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I've been happily using robocopy for backing up my computers to an external usb drive. It's great since it only copies the files that were changed/updated/new. I can take my external drive to any machine and look at it just as if it's another drive on the computer.

I've recently purchased a 750g and another 1tb external hard drives. I ran a robocopy over the weekend that copied about 500g to my external drive. After the copy My Computer shows that ~500g has been used on the external drive. The strange thing is that when I click on the drive in Windows Explorer, nothing shows up in the right pane of Windows Explorer (and the + goes away in the left pane). I copied a single file (drag-and-drop) to this drive and it shows up in Windows Explorer. Command Prompt show the same thing. 1 file.

I know the files are on the drive as it shows up as the Free Space has been reduced.

I read that I should make sure simple file sharing is off, which it is. I also took ownership of the files as Administrator. Still nothing. 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 am doing wrong or how to solve this problem?

thanks! Bill44077

robocopy
5 Answers

When copying from the root directory of a drive to a folder (non-root directory on a different drive), this can happen.
RoboCopy may set the new directory to hidden, as it copies the system attribute of the root folder of the drive over to the new folder.

You can prevent the new directory from becoming hidden by adding the /A-:SH option/flag/switch to your robocopy command.
See this Server Fault Answer to "Why does RoboCopy create a hidden system folder? " for more information.
However, this may or may not prevent copying system attributes in other folders, according to this discussion on the Microsoft forum "ROBOCOPY hides destination Directory".

Here is an example taken from my longer, more thorough, Answer on Super User to the Question "How to preserve file attributes when one copies files in Windows?":
Robocopy D:\ C:\D_backup /A-:SH /DCOPY:T /COPYALL /E /R:0 /ZB /ETA /TEE /V /FP /XD D:\$RECYCLE.BIN /XD "D:\System Volume Information" /LOG:C:\D_backup_robocopy.LOG /MIR

However, if you already copied the directory without the /A-:SH option, running the command mentioned by Ricky above (attrib -h -s -a [ Drive : ][ Path ]) will fix the issue by unhiding the directory. Though, I found that -a was not needed.
So in my case, for the example above, attrib -h -s C:\D_backup (without the -a option) made D_backup visible.

user_54118170

In addition to the great answers SherylHohman and Ricky left I wanted to add that merely adding the /A-:SH switch for robocopy did not work and the copy created a hidden, system folder on the destination drive.

However, using the /A-:SHA parameter did work and my top level destination directory was not given the system or hidden attributes. Weirdly, my drive does not have the "a" (archived) attribute set so I am dumbfounded as to why this works at all. I do prefer simply removing these attributes to only the root destination folder after completion of the robocopy command per Ricky's suggestion so that these attributes are respected for any sub-directories. Though the /A- switch is easier to manage and (for my backup purposes) are not relevant to any directories I am backing up. You may want to consider not removing the system or hidden attributes if you're backing up your C:\ drive though.

user_46412320
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