Documents & My Documents

[User20009]

I'm not sure you guys are aware of this but ive discovered a little problem relating to vista and above.

Lets use a picture as an example..in the search results it displays 3 files for an identical picture (presuming 1 original, 2 duplicates)

1) C:\Users\Username\Pictures\Album_name\picture.jpg
2) C:\Users\Username\Documents\My Pictures\Album_name\picture.jpg
3) C:\Users\USername\My Documents\My pictures\Album_name\picture.jpg

The thing is though, although it looks like these are 3 different seperate files they're actually all the same file just under different paths so if you delete one of these then you're actually just deleting the original.
From what i can tell there are no "MY" folders in windows vista, the only reason it displays is because there are fake paths that redirect files that would normally be installed into a "MY" directory to the normal directory that vista uses which are plain folders without any "MY", documents folder, pictures folder ect.
So from the results, 1) would be the file and 2) and 3) are just false alternate path names towards 1).

Would there be anyway to hide this or make the program skip "fake" paths so that everyone doesnt end up deleting original files lol.

Thanks, Excellent program otherwise

[DV]

Interesting, thanks for this. It looks like the My Documents folder doesn't really exist, and it a symbol link to Documents. Does this issue still occur if 'Exclude hard linked files from duplicate list' is ticked?

[User20009]

I checked the 'Exclude hard linked files from duplicate list' from the menu and run a quick search again and the same thing appears, one original file and two false paths pointing to the same file.

I done a quick google and it seems these are called junction points, im not sure if thats the same as symbol links as you mention as im not too clued up with this but it generally seems to be the reason for this particular issue i think.

Cheers