2

Before upgrading to Windows 8 I did several backups to a secondary drive and specifically to this folder: E:\Backups\Keepers\2013.02.14 Before Windows 8. The backup folder included Acronis True Image Home 2010 backups and a number of xcopy's.

When I installed Windows 8 I wiped the two partitions on my SSD drive in favour of one partition for Windows 8 and proceeded with installation without a problem. As expected the secondary drive changed from E: to D: because the SSD drive now has one, not two, partitions.

Today when I went to restore files I could not see the D:\Backups\Keepers\2013.02.14 Before Windows 8 folder. Heart sunk! After investigation I found the 2013.02.14 Before Windows 8 folder had System and Hidden attributes. I did not set those attributes.

This leads me to the following questions:

  1. What might have turned on System & Hidden attribute?
  2. When I removed the attributes from 2013.02.14 Before Windows 8 folder one of two sub folders had the same issue. Why?
  3. I found the folder had these attributes by dir .tib /s. Why did dir find show these files given they were is hidden & system folders?
Tim Murphy
  • 273

4 Answers4

2

I will tell you about propagation: When one folder is marked hidden, by default when using the gui the attribute will be propagated to files and subfolders. I cannot of course tell you why it happened. dir will show all files as harrymc said, but you can (as I do) tell windows explorer to show hidden and system files and folders, that's googlable.

Update for comments

Hiding and applying to subfolders is default behavior in Windows when using the gui, and possible using the /S option from the command line:

C:\Users\me>attrib /?
Displays or changes file attributes.

ATTRIB [+R | -R] [+A | -A ] [+S | -S] [+H | -H] [+I | -I]
       [drive:][path][filename] [/S [/D] [/L]]

  +   Sets an attribute.
  -   Clears an attribute.
  R   Read-only file attribute.
  A   Archive file attribute.
  S   System file attribute.
  H   Hidden file attribute.
  I   Not content indexed file attribute.
  [drive:][path][filename]
      Specifies a file or files for attrib to process.
  /S  Processes matching files in the current folder
      and all subfolders.
  /D  Processes folders as well.
  /L  Work on the attributes of the Symbolic Link versus
      the target of the Symbolic Link

enter image description here

MDMoore313
  • 6,336
2

I know this is very old but check this:

https://serverfault.com/questions/55668/why-does-robocopy-create-a-hidden-system-folder

In short, "it has to do with copying the hidden/system System Volume Information from the root of a disk – if it gets copied, the target directory gets the same attributes system/hidden. Creating the directory before copying does not help as robocopy will hide it too. Add the /A-:SH switch to ignore system files" to the robocopy command.

More information in this Microsoft Technet discussion, which clarifies that the switch is not the somewhat more intuitive /A:-SH.

Community
  • 1
Lazaros Filippidis
  • 21
0

First, the dir command is an ancient left-over from MS-DOS. It is supposed to show all files by design, since in these days Microsoft was not very much concerned with unaware consumers as clients.

The best explanation I can find for these file-attribute changes is that these files were created by an account that was badly translated to Windows 8, so they ended up with funny attributes. Only well-known accounts, for example the real Administrator or Everyone, are (usually) guaranteed to be perfectly conserved after a Windows version upgrade.

In any case, a real explanation of what happened will require knowledge of the Windows 8 upgrade program and its bugs, and no Microsoft developer will ever give you a straight answer about bugs in this forum (or any forum).

harrymc
  • 498,455
0

simply some viruses done that, I have many similar issue in my customers PC and flash drives, they asked for recovery because they think their files are gone!!!

simply open an command prompt with administration privilege, go to root of your driver letter that in your case is D:

D:\attrib -R -S -H *.* /S /D

all done!

Kaveh
  • 759