8 ms·
Windows 8: Improving our file management basics: copy, move, rename, and delete
- drivebyacct2 15y agoI'm very excited for Windows 8 and these posts are a big help in that (as well as what I perceive to be a great opportunity for the Windows platform across phones, tablets and desktop). Maybe Microsoft will actually do this correctly instead of implementing it like Nautilus, where the copies aren't queued and thus happily trash the disk (hell, even the pause feature is quite welcome).
- tptacek 15y agoCan you imagine Apple reassuring its users that there will be a "vibrant market" for 3rd party providers of what became Lion features for a long time?
- william42 15y agoIf the Department of Justice descends upon Cupertino, yes.
- rat 15y agoDidn't OS X not have restore from trash until recently(even after gnome)?
- thatjoshguy 15y agoBut OS X did have the consolidation of file transfer dialog boxes for a long time. (Although it still has woeful conflict resolution http://cl.ly/9Zqg http://cl.ly/9Zqg)
- rimantas 15y agoLion lets you keep both.
- megablast 15y agoLion does not let you skip files that you don't want copied, if they already exist. Which is a ridiculous choice, and one that is very hard to work around.
- thatjoshguy 15y agoThat's what I thought, but I took that screenshot from lion.
- ww520 15y agoOne copy tool that's not well known is RichCopy from Microsoft. It's a great copy util when dealing with huge amount of files. It supports parallel copy, resume from failed, and copy only changed files.
- Athtar 15y agoRichCopy is always one of the first tools I install on any of my machines. It's an amazingly powerful tool. About the only thing missing with RichCopy is integration with Explorer Shell.
- sliverstorm 15y agoSo Windows users finally don't have to install cygwin for rsync
- runjake 15y agoI suppose. If you didn't know about Robocopy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy) which has been around since the NT days. Rsync under Cygwin was always too slow. Any sort of significant I/O is slow under Cygwin.
- heresy 15y agoRobocopy, while useful, does not have very many of the features of rsync, apart from retries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync
- RexRollman 15y agoTrue, Rsync has more features, but Robocopy is still a very useful tool. And it has been included in Windows since Vista.
- runjake 15y agoBut with all the problems of rsync and cygwin on Windows, Robocopy is the more logical choice for such tasks. I'm not going to load up explorer.exe in WINE on Linux so I can move some files around with the mouse.
- glhaynes 15y agoI guess my first feeling when I see that histogram is ... that's not something I've ever wanted. Pause button is kinda cool though.
- mikeknoop 15y agoI think the histogram solves the usability issue where a network transfer is hung up but the "transfer speed" linearly, slowly drops off (because it is calculated as a total average). The only way to verify the transfer previously is to check if the total transfer percent/value changes absolutely.
- glhaynes 15y agoWouldn't a rolling average of the last 15 seconds solve that problem?
- Fizzer 15y agoIt wouldn't solve it, it would just reduce it. It would still take 15 seconds to be able to identify that your connection dropped if you judged based off of that figure alone.
- glhaynes 15y agoIf your throughput suddenly dropped to 0 and you were watching a 15-second rolling average of that throughput speed, you'd within a very few (far less than 15) seconds know that your transfer speed had cratered.
- wlievens 15y agoI don't think that's a histogram. It's a chart plotting the throughput at time intervals.
- glhaynes 15y agoYou're correct, thank you.
- Turing_Machine 15y agoI notice that file extensions are visible in some of the screenshots. Does that mean they're getting rid of that dumb (IMO) policy of hiding the extensions from users by default? The result was lots of naive users clicking on nekkid-pitcher-of-hot-celeb.jpg.exe because they couldn't see the .exe part, in exchange for...what, exactly?
- monkeypizza 15y agoAnd they punished those of us who make them visible again, by having the "edit filename" function mix the extension with the filename, even though wanting to change the extension is about 100 times more rare than wanting to change the characters right before the extension. I've seen a nice version of this in linux somewhere - when you push F2 two boxes come up and the cursor is positioned in the one to the left of the dot but you can move across to it easily. EDIT: Ah, this is available in windows 7 too. Nice, finally.
- IChrisI 15y agoIn Windows 7 (maybe Vista too), the "edit filename" function lets you edit the extension, but has only the filename selected. Thus Edit -> start typing -> Enter changes the filename, leaving the extension intact.
- thatjoshguy 15y agoFor what it's worth, OS X does this http://cl.ly/9ZeF http://cl.ly/9ZeF
- RobAtticus 15y agoWindows 7 does what you described in your second paragraph.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- rodh257 15y agoif they never ever showed the users the extension users would look at the icon rather than the extension and we wouldn't have this problem
- Athtar 15y agoWhile I like the improvements, I am a little disappointed that they are not implementing parallel/multi-threaded copying. It might not be something that a majority of users would need, but it feels like it should be something that should be natively supported by the OS.
- pbz 15y agoWhat do you mean? It showed two batches being copied in parallel. If anything, they should do less in parallel and rather queue up jobs between same disks.
- Athtar 15y agoYes, you can have multiple copy operating running in parallel but the way Windows works, the files themselves are copied in serial order (within an individual copy operation). Whereas with tools like RichCopy, you are actually copying multiple files in parallel. See here for example; http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/blog/images/RichCopybulkfilecopytoolreleasedgetither_11531/RichCopy_thumb.jpg http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/blog/images/Rich... This is incredibly useful when you need to copy folders with a lot of (smaller) files. Think pictures, music, etc.
- dpark 15y agoI'd be interested in seeing benchmarks that demonstrate an improvement when doing this. I'd expect that the average case is slower due to increased disk contention.
- chirs 15y agoWhat would be the use case for something this?
- roel_v 15y agoIt's funny how one group of people are bashing this feature for not doing parallel copy, and another group for doing it...
- mikeknoop 15y agoLove the x220 in the video.
- redguava 15y agoCan't help but think the file transfer rate charts is development effort that could have been better spent elsewhere. I don't really need graphically representation of the speed of my copy/paste from start to end.
- mrmaddog 15y agoAre multiple large copy jobs common? I can't recall ever doing large copies of two distinct sets of files simultaneously, which makes me wonder when I'd ever use this dialog box. Would be curious to know what their telemetry data shows. Another thing I think is interesting: the graph will never be intuitive because they've compounded the progress bar with the actual plotting. Thus, fast operations will take up a larger percentage of the graph because during fast operating speeds more progress will have been completed. Conversely, slow periods in the graph will be disproportionately smaller compared to the actual percentage of time that the slow operation took.
- IChrisI 15y agoI want the copy functionality to tell me about conflicts right away, rather than when it starts copying that file. I also want it to continue the non-conflicting files while I'm deciding. I cannot tell from the video whether Windows 8 does this or not.
- lukeschlather 15y ago>I also want it to continue the non-conflicting files while I'm deciding. That's the big point. The most serious usability flaw is when doing a large copy, and every single file with a permissions issue requires user intervention to make the copy continue. Keep a running list of problem files, and let me peruse them at my leisure - keep copying the rest.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sid0 15y agoI also want it to continue the non-conflicting files while I'm deciding. Windows 7 does it, so I imagine it wouldn't regress in Windows 8.
- oskee80 15y agoGreat, but I wish they'd fix this first: http://goo.gl/KzQBG http://goo.gl/KzQBG
- ars 15y agoDon't use url shorteners here. The real url is http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/windows-explorer-expands-folders-inappropriately/50a81b05-da98-4d55-821d-55ffbbd0e998 http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-f...
- oskee80 15y agoIt was bad form to just post a link without any background... There is a well-known usability bug in Win7 explorer that the engineers are aware of but don't seem to care about. Bug report: http://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsServerFeedback/feedback/details/621426/bug-when-expanding-folders-in-explorer-server-2008-r2-and-windows-7 http://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsServerFeedback/feedback/... More discussion: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/windows-explorer-expands-folders-inappropriately/50a81b05-da98-4d55-821d-55ffbbd0e998 http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-f... I'm irritated because it seems the only attention given to Win7 is critical/security fixes, while any non-critical bugs will be ignored and the answer will be to simply buy the next version of Windows if you want the problem to go away. IMO a lack of attention to detail and caring about your users.
- mattyohe 15y agoHow many other experiences at Microsoft are referred to as “copy Jobs”?
- steveb 15y agoThis is the OS that is supposed to carry MS until at least 2015. If they are going to unveil the cool stuff during BUILD, why just not wait a couple of weeks? - The examples seem dated, like people copying pictures over USB drives in the era of facebook and dropbox. He runs the example on a netbook, which I guess means after his sister leaves he needs to get another USB drive and copy those files again to his PC. - Why did he copy files, edit them, copy them back and then need to figure out what version he wanted to use? Now he's got two copies of the same filename in different locations and they may get out of sync. - Why in the case of conflict, does a number have to be added to the file if you want to keep both versions? Why not have some type of versioning and conflict resolution built into the filesystem? Look at a user's computer, directories are littered with filenames like "copy of Myfile (2) 2011_may.doc". - Where is the touch interface? Those buttons are small and all the dialogs assume a mouse. I do like the blog and I like that they introduce different members of the Windows8 team, but they need to focus on more compelling features.
- sid0 15y agoYes, people copy pictures over USB drives in the era of facebook and dropbox. Get out of the Silicon Valley bubble and realize that most of the world still doesn't have good enough internet.
- ashr 15y agoFacebook and Dropbox are not like running water yet and even that isn't available everywhere. A lot of users still use USB drives to copy pictures.
- georgieporgie 15y agoUgh. So, instead of tackling something like auto-queuing of copy operations to prevent disk thrashing, they did the 'hard' work of adding a pause button and some silly bling. Incidentally, if that conflict-resolution dialog doesn't provide mouse-over image enlargement/preview, I'm going to instantly hate it.
- sjs 15y agoPeople who are serious about this stuff just use TeraCopy on Windows anyway. Who wants to copy terabytes or even gigabytes of data and not verify it? People who build systems, in general and excluding the ZFS authors, really need to start worrying about my data's integrity at least as much as I do.
- sjwright 15y agoI used to use TeraCopy, but on my Windows 7 64 bit machine, it's half the speed of the built-in copy for network transfers. It's fairly clear that Windows is doing a significantly better job with buffering. I still keep TC around for the odd job, but it's no longer my default.
- sjs 15y agoOuch. That's good to know. Through sheer luck till now I've mostly done network transfers using smb + rsync on my notebook.
- acqq 15y agoYes, from their example ("pausing" one task speeds up the rest, and graphs show speed progress "hills and valleys") it can be concluded that they let copy tasks run in parallel instead of queuing the files. That's practically a guaranteed way to produce more fragmented disk layouts. Well done, current MSFT programmers. You understand what's going on in MSFT when the blog post ends with the line like "All of this adds up to building a significantly improved copy experience, one that is unified, concise, and clear, and which puts you in control of your experience." A clear example of managerspeak -- adjusted to sound good among other managers not to mean something.You see even from where the battles for "bling" come.
- DCoder 15y agoAm I the only one who still uses Total Commander instead of Windows Explorer whenever possible? I'd love to see this multiple-jobs-in-movecopy-queue functionality in it, but in all other situations it suits me so much better.
- acqq 15y agoI think I would not be able to use Windows without the Total Commander. I used the text-based Norton Commander in the eighties. Now I use Total Commander, including command line, Ctrl-E to get the previous line, Ctrl-Enter to get the file I'm on in the command line etc.
- roel_v 15y agoIs it sufficiently better than FreeCommander to justify the 48 USD? (also, has that website been updated since 1995? 'Order by fax' - WTF? 'Now also with Paypal!' - Uh?)
- 4ad 15y agoYou can install the trial and it will run forever.
- Nick_C 15y ago> Total Commander ... multiple-jobs-in-movecopy-queue functionality Try xplorer2. I've been a very happy user for about a decade.
- yhlasx 15y agoThis was my 9th grade cs project.
- ashcairo 15y agoIt really bugged me when he hit 'more details', then had to drag the window back up to the center of the screen, because the details didn't fit in view.
- moondowner 15y agoI tried not to troll this, but these kinds of dialogs are present in GNOME for long time: https://twitpic.com/6aiqxt https://twitpic.com/6aiqxt - at the end of the day, that's what most of end users are going to notice. I have high doubts about the pause button too, will it freeze the window to 'Not Responding' or it will just pause the operation in progress...
- ruethewhirled 15y agoRealistically how many windows users have even heard of GNOME? Their not going to notice. And of course pausing it is not going to freeze the window to "Not Responding". The people working at Microsoft are actually really smart I don't think you tried hard enough
- moondowner 15y agoWell, in Windows 7 (on my PC) in 1 out of 3 times the window freezes when clicking Cancel during a copy or move operation, my reasons to doubt come from there. And I'm talking about a Core 2 Duo machine with 4 Gigs of ram.
- halo 15y agoIt's interesting to note the difference between the Windows 8 dialog has compared to the GNOME one. You can minimise the Windows 8 dialog. On Windows 8, the dialog shows both where the files are coming from and where they're going to. By default, Windows hides most information in favour of a percentage. Click "More details" and Windows shows you much more information than GNOME does - Windows has emphasis on power user information. The Windows dialog's layout is much better. The GNOME dialog's buttons stick out. GNOME's dialogs are really ugly and this is no exception. It really shows the difference in polish between the two products. My criticisms of Windows' dialog is that 'flat buttons' are aesthetically appealing but not particularly user-friendly, and perhaps Windows should show filesize and progress by default.
- sapphirecat 15y ago> You can minimise the Windows 8 dialog. IIRC, if you "closed" the gnome one, it went to the systray, which is a UI problem all its own. Also, you can pause the win8 operations, not just cancel them. As for ugliness, this seems to be a shot of Hardy, give or take, so 2008-ish. I would say that the Ambiance theme that debuted to much controversy in 2010 is improved over the screenshot. (And neither of these are Gnome's default.)
- yread 15y agoI use Total commander for these things on Windows, it already has queuing and the replace dialog does have more features ( http://flint-inc.ru/Temp/over_dlg_3.png http://flint-inc.ru/Temp/over_dlg_3.png ) but this looks cool too and I like the histograms :)
- yason 15y agoThe current copying paradigm is utter 70's. Here's a hint for you from the 2000's, you Microsoft or Linux or Gnome developers: What I would like is that copies seem instant and transparent. Actually, I wouldn't like to think of copying at all. I "copy" (or merely just order) a file to (appear in) some place and it immediately becomes accessible from there. Or I decide to move it back a few seconds later and I can do that. In reality the computer should manage the low-level copying internally and consider it more like syncing. I shouldn't have to care about how long something takes or how the kernel will queue the actual copy operations, or whether it copies anything at all but just creates a copy-on-write mapping to the same data. I also shouldn't have to wait for copying: I should be able to just copy something and immediately turn off the computer. The operating system would continue copying the blocks, if necessary, when it's restarted later. All copy operations ought to be logically atomic as well: either a copy is immediately made or it isn't, the physical details of copying and remapping the corresponding blocks shouldn't be any of my concern. So, an immediate, transaction-based and logically coherent file operations with automatic kernel-level delayed-I/O backend is what I would call the 2000's. I hope that there already is at least one research O/S somewhere that would do this.
- Mavrik 15y agoSo basically, you'd "copy" a file on an external harddrive, plug it out and then have a surprise when you'd notice that the file isn't actually there when you get to another computer? Because cross-device copying is the only place where this operation is slow, with modern HDDs all other operations are instantanious for all intents and purposes. Good idea but you really should have put more tought on it.
- thisisfmu 15y agoWhy let the exception case (removing an external drive quickly) ruin the main use case? going forward it seems reasonable to assume ubiquitous network connectivity, so you can simply treat external drives as a cache and show a non-modal alert "please reconnect for sync, expected to finish within X minutes" iff the amount of data synced is large enough to matter via a 3G connection.
- lloeki 15y agoWould it tell me beforehand that not enough space is available instead of failing midway? Also, I can see a use case for this pause item here: not enough space? we paused the transfer so that you can free up space and resume, or cancel at will. The "use pause to prioritise the thing I'm not interacting with" part is egregious at best. Let me drag/drop the activities to prioritise them: "I want THAT one to complete faster, so I move it to the top" seems much more pertinent UX. Besides, having ten parallel copies is a sure performance killer on a single disk. Certainly having a queue with a bunch of worker slots per (read+write) device could be a nice design. A new copy task from disk A to disk B could thus be delayed because there are already a network transfer to disk A and a copy from USB key to disk A in progress. Number of per disk workers could be dynamically adjusted according to IO wait times on a given disk, so that a non-copy task (like starting an application or opening a file) would get priority. Raising/lowering priorities would automatically start/pause transfers according to available workers.
- 4ad 15y agoIt can't know in advance if it has free space or not. 1) Other files might get deleted in the process freeing more space. 2) Other files might get copied to the same volume as well claiming space. 3) There may be transparent compression involved meaning that you could copy more data then it seems or that the original data would claim more space in the target volume.
- lloeki 15y agoI'm on a PC. I'm copying a 30GB total (VM splitted disk VMware image, a bunch of selected folders containing photos or whatever) on an external disk with only 10GB left. The thing should tell me beforehand if I have enough space, not midway through the process. Yes I could look it up beforehand, but why make me take three actions (look for free space on device, look for total space required, order to copy) when one would be sufficient? The computer should do the tedious tasks and let me decide.
- 4ad 15y agoBut I just explained that it is impossible to know in advance if it there's free space or not...
- trezor 15y agoFrom the comments here, it seems that I will still need TeraCopy when Windows 8 comes around. That's a bit of a bummer, but I can live with that. Seriously though. TeraCopy does just the right thing and is one of those "must have" Windows additions, despite the ugly-looking UI. For those interested: http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php
- sjwright 15y agoUnfortunately TeraCopy appears to be abandonware, as it hasn't seen a new version for nearly a year, and no real attempt has been made to deal with its terrible network copy performance under Windows 7.
- smcj 15y agoIsn't that what most Linux environments actually do for years already?
- AshleysBrain 15y agoThe graphs of transfer rates are cool and all, but consider the average "mom" user - what are they going to do with that? Is a complete graph of transfer speed really necessary? It seems a bit of geekyness thrown in because it's "cool" rather than adding significant extra value over a simple text label with the current transfer speed.
- Maakuth 15y agoI don't suppose this "mom" user would click "More information" -button at all.
- forgotAgain 15y agoEvery day I have to work on both Vista and Windows 7 machines. The W7 user experience is much better. One of the reasons it's much better is that Explorer is much better. The user experience with Vista Explorer truly sucks and that suckiness always seems to be in my face. My point being that Explorer matters and any improvements to it with W8 would be a large positive.
- jmilloy 15y agoI got excited... I was hoping for renaming and moving files that are in-use. That continues to be the bane of my win7 experience.
- rbanffy 15y agoThat's something that has been annoying me since the first NT... Today it annoys less because my contact with Windows machines is much smaller, but it still bites me every once and then.
- lean 15y agoSo, almost as good as Teracopy?
- krmmalik 15y agoI was really impressed with Office 2007 when it first came out. After watching the video that demonstrated how it was developed incorporating extensive user feedback etc i was even more impressed. I expected the same methodologies would be applied to Vista and they werent so i was somewhat dissapointed, but Windows 7 turned out pretty good. That said, Office 2010 was over-engineered in many ways. I just hope they dont over engineer Windows 8
- typicalrunt 15y agoReading this article makes me notice the difference between Windows and OSX/nix. Windows is allowing the user to pause and schedule their copy operations, whereas OSX and nix just provide a copy window with the ability to cancel the operation. Even when I want to delete something in Win7, I get the message "Discovering items...". In that time, my *nix box has already deleted it and moved onto the next task. I wish they wouldn't spend so many expensive developer hours to make an efficient pausing mechanism on your copy and move operations when instead they could focus on why the copy and move operations are taking so long in the first place.
- bane 15y agoDear Microsoft: take this http://blog.codesector.com/category/code-sector-software/teracopy/ http://blog.codesector.com/category/code-sector-software/ter... clean it up a bit, build it into windows Thanks