Under what circumstances will windows generate two folders of the same name in the same file tree po

[Destination]

In essence I am backing some items up today.
Using a drive I haven't used in a while for an offsite backup.

Copying across a few directories, and instead of overwriting or asking to replace or copy what is therwe windows seems to have decided to make an entirely new directory with the same name as the old.

In this case on the L: drive, two 'pictures' folders

Why would this occur?

 

[MonkeyBasher]

I am 99.9% sure this is not possible on windows.
It will not even let you have two folders with the same name and different case. Eg "Trees" and "trees".

I would expect that one (or even both) of those folder names has some random /foreign characters in it somewhere that the windows GUI just isn't displaying because you don't have the language pack / character map installed.

 

[Raumarik]

go into them in command prompt and check you can access them that way, it's not possible in Windows to have identical names so something will be different - I'm assuming they were made whilst running Windows?

I'd be worried about the drive to be honest, checkdisk, eventlog etc to ensure it's not on it's way out.

 

[IT Troll]

Don't worry, there is nothing wrong with the drive.

What you are seeing here is the localised folder alias, not the real folder name. This is set through the (hidden) desktop.ini file located inside the respective folders. You can see the real name through command prompt, or by customising the columns shown in Windows Explorer.

This will have come about through the copy operations you have been doing. Deleting the desktop.ini file from the inappropriate folder will remove this alias.

 

[Destination]

Ah superb, it had me very concerned, but it is the secondary backup rather than the primary anyway.
It was copy file operations, just find it strange that 99/100 windows will bring up a prompt box stating folder of name already in destination do you want to copy/replace etc, this time it did not just started copying.

I assume in some way this was related to the copy of a main windows directory (pictures, videos,document)

Thanks for the info, and reassurance.
Going to do a full drive test after backup complete anyway.

 

[bledd]

Does one of them have a space in the name?

Edit, what it troll said is right. One of them is probably called My Pictures