folder lost in Move

Question

Windows 10 - all latest updates

I Moved a directory "name" from a folder under Documents to another directory tree. After I did this the directory "name" had disappeared and I have not been able to find it including the Recycle Bin.

The move was done using a right click select and dragging "name" to its new location.

Any ideas what went wrong amd why?

Answer 1

Thanks for the info that this is a KNOWN bug in Windows 10 and your suggestion to use copy instead. Unfortunately, I never heard about it until I got burned (isn't that how it always happens).

Did this creep in in a recent update or has it been lurking waiting to pounce for a while?

Using copy is not always very practical, so I hope MS is actively trying to fix this. IMHO, this is a major bug because it is such a commonly used command and can have disastrous effects.

I say copy is not always practical, because this particular directory had a large number of pictures, so it takes a long time to copy. After I restored the directory from an old backup and found (all I think) the files that were not in the backup, but we're on another machine, it took a couple of hours to do the 2 tree copies required to do this without using move.

BTW, I did try a recovery utility but it couldn't find what Windows had done with them. I probably waited too long to use it.

Again thank you for your response. I was lucky that I did have the data available in other locations.

Answer 2

Hi Stephen,

This is a known bug in Windows 10, that is why it is safer to use the copy command rather than the Move command and when you are sure the data has been copied, you can then safely delete the original folder.

If you are lucky, that data will still be on the clipboard, open the destination folder and press Ctrl + V to paste that data.

If that does not work, you will need to use a 3rd party recovery utility to try to recover that folder.