Why does RoboCopy create a hidden system folder

robocopywindows 7

I thought I would try out RoboCopy for mirroring the contents of a folder to another harddrive. And seems like it worked. But, for some reason, to see the destination folder I have to both enable Show hidden files, folders and drives and disable Hide protected operating system files. Why is this? Both the source and destination folder was initially both visible and normal directories. When I open up the properties for that destination folder, the Hidden attribute is even disabled. What is going on here?

Is it because I ran it in an administrator command prompt? Or is it an issue with my choice of modifiers? Or does robocopy really just work this way?

robocopy E: I:\E /COPYALL /E /R:0 /MIR /B /ETA

Update: Tried to copy another drive to another folder, and I got the same thing happening there. But when I try to just copy a folder to a different folder, then the destination folder stays normal. Could it be because I copy a drive? If so, how can I prevent this from happening? Cause I really do want to copy the whole drive…

Best Answer

On my system (Vista), powershell shows the c:\ drive as having both hidden and system attributes set.

    PS C:\Users\michael.DOMAIN> Get-Item c:\


    Directory:


Mode           LastWriteTime       Length Name
----           -------------       ------ ----
d--hs     8/18/2009 12:19 PM        <DIR> C:\

After copying the files, you can use attrib to fix them. Check out attrib /? for details.

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