So I have a pile of flash drives with data on them that i am backing up to an external hard drive in folders that are numbered to keep data separate for each thumb drive that is copied. Windows Copy/Paste told me it was going to take 19 hours to copy 32GB of data to the 8TB external HDD and so I stopped the transfer.
I then ran robocopy and the contents were transferred over within a few hours. I then decided to stick with robocopy because its faster and inserted another flash drive this one was 8GB in size and ran the robocopy instruction at command shell to have it copy all contents to a clean directory. Part way through the robocopy to the external drive the flash drive acted up to where it wasnt able to complete. I scanned the flash drive and it was unable to correct the problem with it. I then went to format the flash drive and it then said that the flash drive was 0MB in size. Having seen flash drives die like this in the past i was like well at least I might have a partial backup before the drive failed and so i went to check out what i had for data.
Windows Explorer didnt show the folder, so I did a refresh and still didnt show it. I then was like maybe its hidden and so in command shell I went to the folder that I couldnt see with windows and sure enough its there. Did a DIR and it scrolled all the files and folders. Went to properties in control panel to see if somehow it got a hidden folder attribute and the system is set up to show hidden files and folders.... so somehow the folder is hidden from view to Windows 10 but I can access it through command shell. So I made another folder and ran a quick xcopy to send all contents from this hidden to Windows folder and pass them to a folder that is able to be accessed through Windows. All contents copied over as I compared them within the command shell.
Deleted the hidden from Windows folder with the RD /s/q and it was gone. Renamed the folder with the data to the folder name that was hidden and then had access to the data that was gathered prior to the thumb drive dying during backup.
Question I have is how was a folder able to be made with contents that is accessible from command shell and yet even with see hidden files and folders enabled completely hidden from Windows?
And is there a better instruction to give robocopy to better handle how to send data to an external drive when device its copying from hits corruption or drive failure in the process to avoid having this weird stuff happen? (or) Should I go back to Windows Copy/Paste which is slower and maybe safer for error handling to not corrupt a drive that your backing up to? ( I am so very thankful that robocopy didnt write to the external in a way that corrupted the entire drive as I have data backed up onto this 8TB drive that this drive is the only copy of the rolling backups and if it got corrupt I'd be out lots of irreplaceable data. )
Here is what I used for robocopy command, where the thumb drive to back up is E: and the external 8TB is at D:
robocopy E:\ D:\Backup1 /E /DCOPY:DAT /R:10 /W:3
