A Problem Shared . . .

We’ve been having a few issues when copy files on Vista PCs. It started when we copied a ‘My Documents’ folder from an XP PC into a user’s documents folder on a Vista PC. We looked in the documents folder and found that the ‘My Pictures’ folder in the ‘My Documents’ folder on the XP PC wasn’t there on the Vista machine even though we’d copied the whole folder.

Looking closer we found that everything in the ‘My Pictures’ folder had been moved to \users\<user>\pictures on the Vista PC during the copy. Reading up it became clear that with Vista Microsoft change the location of many of the application data and user data folders and to minimise application compatibility due to this Vista uses junction points which are hidden redirects to the new folders. That way applications can look for the old folder that XP would use and be transparently redirected to the new location.

One of these junction points for example points \documents and settings\<user>\application data to \users\<user>\appdata

So care has to be taken when copying files and folders as they don’t always end up where you’d expect them to be. Another problem is that some junction points are cyclic – we found this out by trying to copy the whole system drive of a Vista PC onto a backup disk using nothing but Robocopy. It got to the ‘Application Data’ junction point and just got into a loop copy it over and over again into itself resulting in the destination drive having and endless Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\…. path!

The problem can be avoided by using the /XJD switch when using Robocopy.