Missing Users Folder Bug Explained!

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Data-Medics
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Location: Providence, RI USA
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Missing Users Folder Bug Explained!

Post by Data-Medics » Wed Jun 08, 2016 12:39 pm

I think I've finally figured out what's going on with the missing Users folder we've all been griping about. I had to just sit and actually watch a case when it happened to figure it out.

The drive was from a Win Server, and had the Users folder along with the typical "Documents and Settings" symbolic link (which I'll refer to as D&S from here on out). I selected the root directory and starting recovering files out to a destination drive. During the copy process I observed that it was recovering files from inside the "Documents and Settings" symbolic link and unchecking them (I assume) in both the D&S and the Users folder. At the end of the recovery both the D&S & Users folders were completely unchecked, however on the destination drive neither folder appears in Explorer. However, I discovered that if I manually type in D:/Root/Documents and Settings/, the folder does in fact exist and is full of data. For some reason this folder name is just hidden in Explorer even with hidden files set to be viewable. Then I disabled "Hide protected operating system files", and the folder appears as a hidden directory.

So all that needs to be done to resolve the issue is to either uncheck the D&S symbolic link before recovery or just open a terminal window and manually rename the D&S folder to Users so it becomes visible.

Perhaps R-TT could just fix the glitch in the software by forcing it to either recover the "users" folder first before it gets to the D&S symbolic link, ignore it altogether, or just automatically rename the folder to Users at some point.

Update: I just checked on another case where the data was copied directly to the root (not to a /Root/ folder in the root). This time it created a Users folder, but again it was hidden as a protected operating system file. Seems that's the glitch.