Move files to an empty folder find files already there

Help & Support
1

Some very strange thing happened on my big data migration I did last night.

Had some 4 Tb of various files which I should Move to a new computer. Connected with crossover network cable.

Started operation yesterday evening, looked half an hour or so. Everything worked good. It rolled with about 85 Mb/s. Should take about 15 hours to complete. Checked "unattended operation" and went to bed.

Somewhere today it was finished, but it came an error dialogue saying that many files/folder already exists in destination?! About ~1.7 Tb of files actually. How comes that, folder on destination was empty!

Now I don't know anything, there seems to be duplicates, when I manually compare file by file on the replace dialogue. But I can't do it manually with ~1.7 Tb of files.

Question is, how could it have messed up this?

And is there any easy way to solve it, something like "move files and overwrite only similar files"?
(that should do it if there are only duplicates, and if not, I will notice)

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2

I can only guess without details of what was being copied and which things were/weren't duplicated, but it could be you clicked Copy Files twice without noticing and everything queued to copy twice. Or something happened involving localized folder names (where the displayed name doesn't always match the real on-disk name, and copies could use either depending on method) or maybe junctions/symlinks.

The "Skip Identical" option should quickly skip over anything that is already there, as long as the source and destination files have the same name, size and date/time.

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Thanks for answer. I did not click twice. But I have a "junction" there (it is what DOpus lists my folder as, one HDD mounted as folder in the structure of another drive). But shouldn't it be threated as one folder system, how could that have messed up?

Try to give some more details, source was my old W10 computer, destination my new W11 computer. Both formatted with GPT to NTFS file system.

Yes I am doing a copy right now with "skip identical", but then the files are still there on my source. Feels bad :slight_smile: would have been nicer if there was a way to complete the move operation. Sure, I could just delete the files from source. But somehow I don't trust all of this now :frowning: need to check some random folders and see if files are ok. Can't help to think that XCopy which I use to use could have worked better. But I don't know. Probably not.

One thing I do know! I will never use a "junction" anymore :slight_smile: