Copying over music files - numbers don't match

I know this is not really a Roon/Rock question, but I’m hoping someone can advise me.

In preparation for converting my NUC to ROCK, I’ve been copying over my main Watched folder from an internal drive to an external (USB) drive. Went pretty smoothly I thought–a few pathnames were too long for the new drive (not sure why), but I fixed that and copied them over. But once I was done, I found that the new drive has several hundred fewer files than the old drive–about 400. So I did it again and got the same result. The number of folders on each drive match. Random comparisons of folders–I checked about a dozen–revealed no differences. But Properties on the watched folders–internal and external drives–show that several hundred files didn’t copy. Are they music files? I don’t know.

I’m not a Windows guy. Do they have a tool that will let me do a differential on the two folders? Or is that something I’ll need to add? Other thoughts/suggestions?

P.S. I just copied the whole watched folder. Not much opportunity for human error.

Hi,

Windows does not bundle those type of tools … try a 3rd party application FreeFileSync (other options are also available).

Thanks Carl.

Another bit of weirdness/clue: After the copy has completed–apparently normally–there’s a .tmp folder sitting there in the root directory of the new drive, alongside the folder I copied, and alongside some other file starting with a period.

Is Windows really this bad?

I use robocopy, which will give (in robocopy.txt, as used below) a list of files/directories copied and of errors. The following will copy everything from the first parameter (in my case, my music library) to the second parameter, which is the current directory. Do ‘robocopy /?’ to get full parameters.

robocopy “f:\JRiver Files Directory” .\ /E /COPY:DAT /DCOPY:DAT /log:robocopy.txt /xf robocopy.txt

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There could be system files, or files that Windows thinks are system files, that are “hidden” in your file view preferences and thus not copied over. For example, I think each folder has some hidden OS data in it.

My guess is those are not media files. But if there are 400, I’d think you could find a missing media file with some spot-checking to be sure.

Thanks. One thing I did on my spot-checks was turn on hidden files, so I could see them. During the spot-checks, I didn’t see any–but then I didn’t do that many spot-checks. I’m now recopying everything a third time; If the result is the same, I’ll do some more spot-checks.

Thanks.

Just to close this thread: Windows was skipping files where it couldn’t copy their properties–so some of it (probably most of it or all of it) was music. Sometime during copying, I was getting a message saying, "Are you sure you want to copy these files without their properties? I answered ‘yes’ after clicking the little box that says something like, “include all like this” (I forget the actual wording)–and yet obviously some files were being skipped. The third time copying everything over, starting from scratch–after shortening a few filenames and deleting a few hidden files–I ended up with matching file counts.

I’ve seen that kind of thing. It’s why I use robocopy with the parameters I showed. There are other parameters that will raise difficulties with some properties.

That .tmp file is created by Roon, not by Windows.

Thanks Geoff–but I don’t see how this is possible. This was a newly formatted SSD, and at that point Roon was still unaware of it. I had only copied over my main watched folder using Windows File Manager, and the .tmp file was outside that folder.

Ah, OK, I thought you were referring to these .tmp folders, which are created by Roon:

Got it. Hard to tell one .tmp folder from another, when they’re empty. I’m pretty sure though that Roon wasn’t yet aware of this drive. It had to be a Windows thing.

Thanks.