Copy and paste in Windows 10 file explorer resulting in corrupt copies

J

JosephGodino

Hello,


I encountered a very serious issue with trying to copy and paste files to a backup hard drive in Windows file explorer by using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.


Usually I determine whether my backups are complete and in agreement with each other by doing a casual comparison of the total bytes reported in the backup to the total bytes reported in the source.


I decided to check my backup collection more carefully by comparing the SHA-256 hashes of a collection of backed-up files to the SHA-256 hashes of the files on another mirror of the same collection.


After I discovered that there were numerous mismatches, I determined which mirror had file corruption by trying to open the files with hashes that were in disagreement. I opened the corrupt files in a hex editor, and I found that the sizes and filenames were correct but the contents were zero in every byte.


I deleted the corrupt files, then tried to restore them by doing a Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V transfer from the clean mirror. The copies were corrupt after the transfer. I understand that what I am describing is symptomatic of a faulty hard drive. But I'm not convinced that I have that problem. I was able to get the files to successfully transfer if I copied them one-at-a-time instead of copying a whole folder at a time.


I was also able to transfer the files successfully by using the "copy *.*" command in cmd.exe.


Is anyone else getting junk backup files by doing a copy and paste in Windows 10?


Some notes:


I was copying from an NTFS volume to an exFAT volume.

If I decided to copy only one file, I was informed that it would be copied without all of its attributes saved in the source volume.

During my attempt to copy large files, the progress window told me that my transfer rate was 0 bytes/sec to the destination disk.

While the transfer rate was 0 bytes/sec, the names of several large files flashed successively in the progress window.

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