New
#1
Why doesn't the copy function ever know that 2 folders are identical?
I'm copying folder A on external drive E to folder B on external drive K. Folder B is an older copy of folder A which I now want to update so that I have an identical copy of folder A on drive K. I'm calling the copy of folder A on drive K "folder B" just for simplicity. Folder A is 27 gigabytes, 121 folders, 4,000 files.
When I copy A to B the system copies just the new files and after awhile tells me that there are copies of the remaining files already in folder B so I click on cancel or skip remaining files. Then just to be sure I copy folder B back to folder A and it finds a couple hundred files that it says are not in folder A so it adds them then tells me the rest are already in A. So next I just want to be really sure they are both the same so copy folder A back to folder B again, but it starts copying another hundred files from A to B.
I have done this back and forth thing over 20 times till I got completely bored doing it and every single time it copys more files from B to A, then more files from A to B, then more files from B to A, then more files from A to B and on and on. If I look at the properties of both A and B they are identical, same number of bytes, files and folders. But the copy process never sees that they are identical. It will forever think there are some files in A that are not in B and that there are some files in B that are not in A no matter how many times I do this cross copying.
I realize I can just check properties earlier and let it go at that when the properties are identical, but since I keep multiple backups of important files and I'm not always sure when they were last updated I like to do this copying in both directions. But now I find that I can't rely on Windows 7 to really know that some files already exist and it doesn't need to keep copying them over and over again. Is this some kind of bug in Windows 7?