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Re: How did a copy of several hundred files into a new folder find duplicates?

From	"J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk>
Newsgroups	comp.mobile.android, alt.comp.os.windows-10, alt.comp.os.windows-11
Subject	Re: How did a copy of several hundred files into a new folder find duplicates?
Date	2025-07-19 10:38 +0100
Organization	255 software
Message-ID	<105fp2b$2lap1$1@dont-email.me> (permalink)
References	<smvl7khk0muhnli9ob1ng7udjfceec948r@4ax.com>

Cross-posted to 3 groups.

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On 2025/7/19 4:3:28, micky wrote:
> Using Android and Win11, and details of how copy works in win11 may be
> different from win10, or at least important:
> 
> There's probably a better way to do it but I copy my photos from my
> phone to my PC (and later to a backup drive) by displaying the phone's
> camera folder in MyPhoneExplorer's file manager, highlighting the ones

Is MyPhoneExplorer something running on the PC, or on the 'phone?

> that are newer than the ones in the PC, and dragging them to the folder
> in the PC.
> 
> Today I found a cache of photos in a 3rd location on the phone.  I
> understand why external and internal storage, but why two locations in
> internal storage?  So to help myself to look further later, I created a
> new folder in the PC and copied everything to it.  About 626 files, took
> 80 minutes, no problem, I'm not going anywhere.
> 
> But at the end, it found 6 files that already existed in the destination

You say "at the end", but later ask.

> folder.  How can that be when it was a new folder?  I said to keep both
> and give a new name to the ones copied in.  When I look, after the copy
> completed, I have 6 pairs of files, and the date, time, and size are the
> same for each pair. They really are the same.   Did it get mixed up and
> start copying a second time?  Then why did it stop after 6?

I had a similar overwrite query years ago when using my genealogy 
software (Brother's Keeper)'s own backup facility, when I selected the 
option "also backup images" (or something like that); it turned out 
that, although the software is happy linking to images all over the 
place, it backs them up, when you select that option, to the same place; 
thus when I had images of the same name in two different places (say, an 
image of the census return for a given family, stored under the 1891 and 
the 1901 censuses), it asked me keep or overwrite (unfortunately it 
didn't offer a rename option).

[Now, I just use its own backup feature to back up its own data files, 
not images; I back those up, including their directory structure, with 
FreeFileSync.]

I'm wondering: is it possible that, between the naming system of the 
'phone and the computer, you have (six cases of where) two files have a 
different name/identity on the 'phone, but this gets turned into the 
same name on the computer? In other words, it copied one of them fine, 
but when it gets to the second one, it wants to give it a name on the 
computer which it finds already present. So the files weren't there in 
your - newly-created - directory from the start, but from earlier in the 
copying session.>
> Complicating this a bit is that I first started to copy the files to the
> correct folder, realized that the new files would be lost among the old
> files and stopped the copy after less than a minute, time enough maybe
> to copy in 6 files and indeed those same 6 files are in the already
> existing destination folder.  Can something about being copied the first
> time cause them to be copied to the new folder too?  How can that be?

I can't see how it can, but that's assuming you are instigating this 
copying from the computer; knowing little of Android, I don't know if it 
can if you're doing so from the 'phone.

> The new folder didn't exist when I mistakenly copied a few files to a
> different existing folder. And the new folder could not have been a
> duplicate of the existing folder because it was new and I copied nothing
> into it other than that one big copy.
> 
> In Win11, when it says there are duplicate files in source and
> destination, does it say that when it finds them or at the end of the
> whole process?  Either way, this is no easier to solve.  It did know
> there were 6 of them when it brought up the message box.
Sorry, can't answer that one - I'm only on 10, and really only familiar 
with 7. On 7 (and I think 10), it stops the copy to ask what to do 
(keep, overwrite, or rename) when it comes to a duplicate (or seems to; 
maybe it copies/moves all the problem-free ones before asking. But I 
think I've seen it ask this question, then when answered, go back to 
further copying). It does offer "do this with all other similar files?" 
when it asks you to choose what to do, but I don't know if it knows at 
that point how many there are.

-- 
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues
-- Abraham Lincoln quoted by Mark Lloyd in alt.windows7.general 2018-12-27

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