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I am using robocopy to transfer files from an old laptop drive to an external drive because I believe the hard drive is close to failure. I ran the program with these arguments

robocopy D:\ E:\Toshiba1 /E /V /COPY:DAT /MT:32

I've ran the program overnight and it ran last night pulling files from the laptop drive without issue but as I came back in the morning to take a look at it the program started pulling files from my C: drive. Robocopy output I know these files aren't from that D: drive because the user 13617 doesn't exist on that laptop and the folders Payments and Sandisk are unique to the current computer I'm using.

Is there a reason why this may have happened? Could this be prevented by using Richcopy instead?

Folder for D drive, no Documents and Settings

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  • It looks like it's got confused by the symbolic links in the Documents folder. Try using the /xj option.
    – David Marshall
    Commented Jan 4, 2023 at 16:28
  • I wasn't aware of this issue but I'll take a look at it. Thank you.
    – Themanwithaplan
    Commented Jan 4, 2023 at 16:44

1 Answer 1

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I think that these files do indeed exist on the D: drive and not on C:.

The folder Documents and Settings no longer exists on Windows 10/11, so this seems to be an old backup.

You may exclude this folder by adding the following parameter to the command:

/xd "D:\Documents and Settings"

Or, if this is too inclusive :

/xd "D:\Documents and Settings\13617"

If this doesn't help, there might be a symbolic link on D:, so add the parameter /xj, to exclude all junction points. Don't use it if you're using junction points, as it will ignore all of them.

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  • This is indeed an older backup and after checking that folder doesn't exist (I added a pic in an edit to the OP) I'm led to believe that they are junctions. I'll remove them and see what happens. Thank you.
    – Themanwithaplan
    Commented Jan 4, 2023 at 16:46
  • So i tried running it again and it got stuck on a similar issue. /xj should've helped but it ran into an infinite loop again.
    – Themanwithaplan
    Commented Jan 6, 2023 at 0:31
  • I would suggest doing chkdsk without /f, just to check. If you decide to use /f, save first as much data as you can.
    – harrymc
    Commented Jan 6, 2023 at 9:22

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