Comment by 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)

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stinky613

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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.

  • cesarb  7 years ago

    Merging the locations can easily get complicated. What if the same file exists in both folders? What if it exists in both folders, but with different contents? What if not only it has different contents, but also the same last modification time?

    • manigandham  7 years ago

      Why is it complicated? It's no different than moving any other folder to a new location which already has one with the same name, something that has been handled for decades now.

      It should be the same exact action, just triggered by a message saying "Documents folder detected in 2 locations, click OK to copy".

      1 reply →

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.

  • Bartweiss  7 years ago

    I've run into this on a bunch of systems, and it absolutely is a mess. Particularly since Explorer gives all kinds of special status and UI elements to 'Documents' folders - if they just had the same name in different places I'd care way less.

    But the solution to "we screwed up years ago" is definitely not "nuke one instance with no warning and don't even glance at what's there".

    • colemickens  7 years ago

      It's basically the only reason I didn't lose a bunch of data from this bug as an Insider - the "Libraries" and special "My Documents" folders are so damn messy and have caused me data loss at other times, that I stopped using it and manage things myself.

      Another lovely one, for ages (probably still) OneDrive would purge it's local copy whenever you turned it off or uninstalled it. That was probably one of the most frustrating things that Windows has ever done to me.

      Edit: Lord, can we please talk about "3D Objects" too? Who the hell got promoted for shoving that down everyone's throat in half a dozen places? Every week I get an update I have to run a regedit script to remove all the bullshit they've shoved into Explorer for absolutely no reason.

      3 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).