Queued copy job, files not found

I'm using 12.26.1, on the latest dev channel release of Win11. I just noticed something I had seen once before but couldn't figure out what had happened. Now I think I understand what happened, and I think it's a bug, or at least something I'd expect to work that doesn't. Or I'm dreaming.

I did a search in one folder (and group of sub-folders). Selected some of the matching files, and dragged and copied to a folder on another drive. This job was queued appropriately, as other files from another folder were already being copied to a different folder on the target drive. Then I did a second search in the same folder, selected some of the results, and dragged them to the target drive to copy. When the original copy job completed and the first of the queued jobs began, all of the source files caused an error "source file not found", and I had to skip them. Then the second queued job completed correctly. I went back and repeated the first search and then successfully selected and copied those files, which were right where they were supposed to be.

It seems as if replacing the first search with the second invalided the copy job based on results from the first search.

I tried the whole thing again just for kicks on a different target drive, and seem to have reproduced this unexpected behavior.

The files are only being copied, not moved, in the first step, is that correct?

The job that was running when I queued the copy operations was a move, from an external drive D to an external drive K. The first queued job (which failed) was a copy based on search results from an internal drive to drive K. Same with the second queued job that succeeded.

If you’re doing a mixture of copies and moves, from the same source files, then the source files may not exist anymore.

In other words, if job 1 moves C:\File.txt to D:\ and job 2 (which is queued before job 1 has finished) tries to also do something with C:\File.txt then it isn’t going to work because the file is now in another place.

Please note that the files were, and still are, available at the source of the copy operation. I went back and repeated the first search and copied the files on a second attempt. All the copies came from an internal hard drive that still has all the files it started with. I was basically moving files from one external drive to another larger one, while adding files to the larger external drive from an internal drive.

I'll try to recreate and simplify the issue with a different set of files and external drives while documenting everything specifically, to prove to myself I'm not crazy and eliminate the possibility there is an issue with the source internal drive.

1 Like