Vanishing Folders in XP

November 23, 2006 5:02 PM

XP: Vanishing Folders -- Sometimes I put a tilde (one of these ~) in front of a folder name to alphabetically move it to the top of a folder list. These folders, I'm now realizing, are vanishing on me. Any idea why? Any idea where to find them?
posted by rumbles to computers & internet (14 comments total)

First, open any Explorer window. My Computer will do nicely. From the Toolbar, select Tools, then in the list select Folder Options. The second tab from the left will be labelled "View," so click it. In the now visible Advanced Settings scroll-box, under "Files and Folders" you will see a subfolder of settings labelled "Hidden files and folders." Under that select the radio button for "Show Hidden Files and Folders."

That should make your tilde'd folders visible.

But if I were you, I'd switch over to using an underscore ("_") instead, as I think (could be wrong) the purpose of the tilde at the front of a folder name is actually to make it hidden.
posted by grabbingsand at 5:16 PM on November 23, 2006

Thanks. My "hidden folders" are already visible, fwiw. Still missing folders. The "_" suggestion is a good one though....
posted by rumbles at 5:23 PM on November 23, 2006

Yeah, and temporary folders often start with a ~ too, so if you have a cleaning program, it might think those are temporary folders and wipe them out.
posted by IndigoRain at 5:23 PM on November 23, 2006

...which means you should take a look in the trashcan before too long.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 5:26 PM on November 23, 2006

A cleaning program like CCleaner, perhaps? Hmm.... Any retrieval suggestions?
posted by rumbles at 5:26 PM on November 23, 2006

... since my CCleaner is set to clean out the recycle bin .... I'm using PC Inspector to try and retrieve the files at present.
posted by rumbles at 6:25 PM on November 23, 2006

The tilde character is used as a special shortcut to allow long filenames to be represented to old DOS programs. They didn't understand anything more than 8.3. "C:\Program Files", for instance, is "C:\PROGRA~1" for a DOS-only app. I would not be surprised if putting a tilde at the start of a filename causes various forms of havoc. If you're running NTFS, I suspect the files will still be there. If you're running FAT32, god only knows.

I'd suggest opening a command prompt and going in to look at the directories in as close to raw form as possible. (cd to the directory you want, dir when you get there). If you see your directories, rename them from the command prompt. If you don't.... try typing 'attrib' by itself and see if you can see the directories that way. If you can, you will likely have to turn off hidden, system, and/or read-only bits... they'll show an H, S, or R in the first column of attrib. (to turn them off: attrib -s -h -r filename.blah).

If you don't see them with either dir or attrib, hmm. Not sure what to do from there.
posted by Malor at 6:39 PM on November 23, 2006

If you're running ccleaner, I expect it's mistaking your tildanated files for post-Word-crash temporaries and deleting them.
posted by flabdablet at 7:48 PM on November 23, 2006

Once your folders are deleted from the recycle bin you will probably need professional help to retrieve them. Maybe there are still some "user-friendly" utilities out there to recover such things (in DOS era there were many such programs). The point is, there's no such a thing as a "total wipe". Last time I saw. military grade recover programs could rebuild a hard disk after nine or ten low level formatings. You're talking about accidental deletes, so it won't be that hard. If your folders were that important, there are companies out there that will be glad to recover them for you (it may be expensive, tough).
posted by nkyad at 8:17 PM on November 23, 2006

I think they're seen as temp files and deleted.
I prefix with numbers to move folders and bookmarks to the top.
The advantage is you can have a bunch of alphabetized 1 folders, ditto for 2 folders, and so on. When you sort alphabetically, they always keep their pecking order.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 8:32 PM on November 23, 2006

Thanks all. Losing these two folders was not a huge loss. I had backed them up (a while ago). I'll consider it a good pruning.... A lesson learned, however.
posted by rumbles at 9:53 PM on November 23, 2006

Rumbles, what I usually do to get some folders listed at the top, without it looking a little too weird, is to use a no break space, from character map.

Alt+0160

Just put them before the name of the folder, and they go to the top of the list without too much fuss, and it keeps the folder names clean.

There are 2 below this line, one in each new line:
posted by althanis at 4:45 AM on November 24, 2006

I prefix with an underscore myself. Still puts things at the top.
posted by neckro23 at 10:42 AM on November 24, 2006

An underscore is a better choice. If you use a non-breaking space, it would cause you grief if you were attempting to enter the folder name as part of a path and forgot that you'd included such a character in there.

If this lesson has demonstrated anything, it's that being too clever isn't clever.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:42 AM on November 24, 2006