In the process of fixing my fiance’s laptop, I backed up all of her data and then reformatted her hard drive to reinstall the operating system. Any Windows user knows the joy of a freshly installed OS.
Somehow, when we looked at the backups, we noticed that none of her music was present. I had copied her entire User directory, but the tool I used, in its infinite wisdom, decided against copying music as if we had never really intended to copy it in the first place. It then proceeded to not tell us it didn’t copy it, making sure we felt no remorse with choosing the utility in the first place.
So, after attempting to recover her files, I wrote my own. “RecursiveCopy” is a very simple command line tool. That means you copy the file anywhere, go to your command prompt, navigate to it, and run it. It takes a source directory, a destination directory, and a file type. Other tools that do the same thing probably exist but I didn’t want to bother with them. This tool copies all the files from one directory to another of a particular extension. Simple to use, pretty fast, and useful when I’ve had to use it.