A customer reported that Explorer was not showing a folder on their hard drive that they were sure was there. <\/p>\n
I asked them to check whether the folder really was there, by going to a command prompt and using the Turns out the folder really was gone. <\/p>\n The customer went back and retraced their steps and reconstructed what happened. <\/p>\n First, the customer created a folder on their Next the customer copied two files from their So far so good. <\/p>\n Next, the customer wanted to copy their entire The customer let this command run for a while, but then the operation started encountering <\/i>Access denied<\/i> errors, so they hit Ctrl<\/kbd>+C<\/kbd> to stop the robocopy command. <\/p>\n At this point, the customer noticed that the The customer theorized, “I suspect that what happened is that robocopy was matching the directory structure of the The customer continued, “From a user perspective, it seems that I should<\/i> have really been alerted by robocopy that the target folder (in this case, Well, um, yeah, because that’s what the The The If that’s not what you want, then don’t pass the Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-94975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-tipssupport"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":" Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}dir \/a<\/code> command. <\/p>\nD:<\/code> called D:\\backups\\fdrive\\spreadsheets<\/code>. <\/p>\nF:<\/code> drive to the D:\\backups\\fdrive\\spreadsheets<\/code> folder. <\/p>\nF:<\/code> drive to the D:\\backups\\fdrive<\/code> folder, so they performed the following command: <\/p>\n\nrobocopy \/MIR F: D:\\backups\\fdrive\n<\/pre>\n
spreadsheets<\/code> folder was gone. <\/p>\nF:<\/code> drive against the directory structure of D:\\backups\\fdrive<\/code>, and since my important spreadsheet files weren’t present in the F:\\spreadsheets<\/code> folder on the source, it deleted them from the destination. If I had let the copy run to completion, it presumably would have eventually copied the files from their location on the F:<\/code> drive to the corresponding subdirectory of D:\\backups\\fdrive<\/code>.” <\/p>\nD:\\backups\\fdrive<\/code>) wasn’t empty, and it should have asked for confirmation that I didn’t really want to lose those files (which I didn’t).” <\/p>\n\/MIR<\/code> option means. <\/p>\n\n \/E :: copy subdirectories, including Empty ones.\n \/PURGE :: delete dest files\/dirs that no longer exist in source.\n \/MIR :: MIRror a directory tree (equivalent to \/E plus \/PURGE).\n<\/pre>\n
\/MIR<\/code> option means that the destination folder should be an exact copy of the source folder. The documentation points out that this is the same as \/E<\/code> (copy recursively) combined with \/PURGE<\/code> (remove anything from the destination that is not present in the source). <\/p>\n\/PURGE<\/code> behavior is by definition destructive. <\/p>\n\/MIR<\/code> flag. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"