This is more of a windows 10 question, but here is my problem. Yesterday I moved a long list of canon raw files from my hard drive to a usb thumb drive. I used dual displays and waited for the progress indicator. When finished I placed the thumb drive in a different computer and the pictures were gone. I tried to undo the move, but to no avail. There was some kind of error with my thumb drive which windows corrected. My question is if I use recovery software to get the pictures back, where do direct the search? Does moving a file really mean copy and delete? Thanks!
A move from one device to another will be done as a copy & delete, yes.
When copying to USB drives it's important to eject the drive via the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the system tray, or the Eject option when you right-click the drive. If you don't, the operating system may still be writing cached data out to the drive when it is removed.
Recovery software may get the files back. You should try it on both the source and destination drives, as they both may have data. Any use of the drives will reduce the likelihood of recovery as the deleted data may be overwritten by other data if they are used.
PhotoRec is extremely good for USB sticks.
Recovery programs for the HDD side.
Remember to save the recovered files somewhere other than the drive you are recovering them from.