Comment by jve

7 years ago

Looks like someone didn't do their job correctly. Carrying on a destructive action (DELETE) without first checking whether that folder contains any files (except maybe desktop.ini)...

21 comments

jve

Reply
kgwxd  7 years ago

Just because a folder is currently empty doesnt mean its not used and assumed to exist by some program. Delete shouldnt have been called, period.

  • stinky613  7 years ago

    I won't try to defend their execution, but I think they're trying to solve a legitimate issue. It's really confusing to an end-user if they see two Documents folders.

    And I'm certain that I've personally encountered instances where both Documents folders had the Documents special folder icon (though I'm not sure if I've seen this on Win10, specifically)

    • manigandham  7 years ago

      So move/merge the locations since that is clearly the intention if the user has a redirection setup. A simple message confirming that "there are 2 Documents folders and would you like to move them to a single location" would be sufficient.

      This is just a project management failure that somehow got through, but the fact that it did seems to show major QA issues.

      3 replies →

    • solarkraft  7 years ago

      I have two Documents folders. It's fucking confusing. But I'd think it shouldn't have been possible for them to exist in the first place. Windows Explorer is a mess.

      5 replies →

    • tcfunk  7 years ago

      I ended up in this situation upgrading from 7 to 8 to 10 (not sure which transition was the culprit).

makecheck  7 years ago

There is no “check first” in an ever-changing file system environment that has no atomic operation for something this large. Any “check” is a false sense of security, convincing you that you’re about to do the right thing; meanwhile, any background process could create important stuff in the directory tree you just “checked” and you’d destroy it anyway.

If you could lock down the whole directory tree and then check, it would be moderately safer but you are still assuming the tree contains only what you expect. It’s far wiser to have a list from the start or a file search that you can audit before individually processing files on your list.

  • perl4ever  7 years ago

    Sounds like making the perfect the enemy of the good. Why bother to do any checks of anything when a random flip-flop could go metastable forever and brick your system?