Why does windows 'discover' files before dealing with them ?

[Donnie Fisher]

I'm in the process of shuffling my data backups and stuff to better organise it all. It's a lot of files from over the years and what's becoming frustrating is the discovery of files.

Let's say I want to shift my archive of pictures which is lots of directories and files. If I drag drop copy windows spends an age 'discovering files'. Only once it's done that does it start to transfer.

Does anyone know why does it have to do that ?

Just start copying please ! Really frustrating.

 

[Django x2]

Yep, it's during this phase it's looking at permissions and file attributes.

You can make it stop doing that, IIRC it's a strange setting in Explorer (or even IE) somewhere (or use xcopy / robocopy)

The sensible person would zip them up into an archive. Then Windows has to deal with one file of the same or less size, and it's quicker to copy one large file than 1000's of little ones.