I recently ran into a problem with my home server while transferring some large media files (between 50GB and 150GB) from my Windows 11 PC to an unRAID media share. While the transfer was about halfway done, I made the mistake of shutting down my server to swap out an unmounted drive and add a GPU, not thinking about the file transfer. After rebooting, I found that the file system had corrupted. I managed to fix it using unRAID's XFS Repair utility.
Now, here's the tricky part: about half of the files still exist on my PC, while the other half made it to the server but have been deleted from my PC. Interestingly, one file seems to be present in both locations, and its size matches for both. My question is, if I understand correctly, Windows doesn't actually delete the original file until the transfer is complete, right? So, with half of the files still on my PC and the others on the server, does that mean I should have non-corrupt, complete files? I want to avoid dealing with degraded quality from my foolish mistake. While I can re-download the files, it would take a lot of time, so I'd prefer to use what I still have if possible.
2 Answers
Yes, that's typically how file transfers work. Windows will keep the original file intact until the new copy is fully transferred. Just so you know, when you drag and drop between different drives, it actually copies by default instead of moving. Since you used the move option, it's good to remember for next time to try a copy instead, so you can avoid these kinds of issues. At least now you know your remaining files should be safe!
You might want to consider command-line tools for transferring files in the future. Some of them verify the files after transfer before deleting the original, which can save you from situations like this one.
I probably ought to look into using those, haha.
Definitely gonna do that moving forward. Thank you for the answer!