Worrying SyncToy problem! (Files being ignored!)

OCdude

OCdude

OCdude

Soldato
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24 Feb 2008
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Okay, so I use SyncToy to do various backup jobs, synchronising various directories on my secondary drive, with my backup drive).

All is fine and dandy, until today - out of curiosity, i decided to compare my music folder. The copy on my backup drive had 38 fewer files and was about 250MB smaller.

Initially I thought that maybe it's just hidden system files that it's ignored (folder album art, thumbs.db, desktop.ini that kinda stuff). But after doing some tiresome folder comparisons, i've discovered that it's (seemingly randomly) ignored several files.

There's no obvious pattern to the ignored files either. They don't contain weird ascii characters, they're not in massively long paths, they aren't all a certain file type, they don't have hidden/system or any other weird attributes..... nothing!

The options in SyncToy are standard, i've set it to Echo the 2 directories, ignoring nothing (i.e. It should copy hidden/system files regardless).

So yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, i'm suddenly not feeling so confident that my ~650GB Backup contains 'all' my data - sods law if I do ever lose anything, it'll be a file that SyncToy didn't bother to backup!

I guess that's all really, moan over! :mad:
 
Okay so I suck. I just double checked and the files that failed were actually in paths that were too large :o

Copying the folders manually using Explorer produces the "path too long...." error, so that pretty much confirms it, although it's pretty annoying that SyncToy doesn't even flag it up or log it.. it just ignores it and carries on!

I've now used Directory Opus to copy over the other files/folders and hooray! Now my backup matches byte for byte!

Not quite sure how Directory Opus manages to copy those folder paths/files when Windows can't - but i'm not complaining :D
 
Windows can at times let you create files with paths that are too long.

Not sure how you have managed this feat with a music library anyway...
 
Annoyingly Synctoy doesn't always delete things from your backup drive when you echo. I still have films and music on my backup drive that I deleted ages ago!
 
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