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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T06:31:48+00:00

I’ve been happily using robocopy for backing up my computers to an external usb

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I’ve been happily using robocopy for backing up my computers to an external usb drive. It’s great since it only copies the files that were changed/updated/new. I can take my external drive to any machine and look at it just as if it’s another drive on the computer.

I’ve recently purchased a 750g and another 1tb external hard drives. I ran a robocopy over the weekend that copied about 500g to my external drive. After the copy My Computer shows that ~500g has been used on the external drive. The strange thing is that when I click on the drive in Windows Explorer, nothing shows up in the right pane of Windows Explorer (and the + goes away in the left pane). I copied a single file (drag-and-drop) to this drive and it shows up in Windows Explorer. Command Prompt show the same thing. 1 file.

I know the files are on the drive as it shows up as the Free Space has been reduced.

I read that I should make sure simple file sharing is off, which it is. I also took ownership of the files as Administrator. Still nothing. It works the same on my WIndows XP machine and my Windows 7 Ultimate.

Has anyone else seen this? Or even better, does anyone know what I am doing wrong or how to solve this problem?

thanks!
Bill44077

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Just ran into this issue myself, so it may be a late response and you may have worked it out already, but for those stumbling on this page here’s my solution…

    The problem is that for whatever reason, Robocopy has marked the directory with the System Attribute of hidden, making it invisible in the directory structure, unless you enable the viewing of system files.

    The easiest way to resolve this is through the command line.

    • Open a command prompt and change the focus to the drive in question (e.g. x:)
    • Then use the command dir /A:S to display all directories with the System attribute set.
    • Locate your directory name and then enter the command ATTRIB -R -S x:\MyBackup /S /D where x:\ is the drive letter and MyBackup is your directory name.
      The /S re-curses subfolders and /D processes folders as well.

    This should clear the Read Only and System attributes on all directories and files, allowing you to view the directory normally.

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