Empty folders disappearing

Hi Umaro, just wondering if you found the issue - I am seeing exactly the same behaviour and can't figure out what's causing it.

SaaX said:

Hi Umaro, just wondering if you found the issue - I am seeing exactly the same behaviour and can't figure out what's causing it.

The same here... I keep having the exact same directories disapear over and over again.
Typically they are named !!!dir1 !!!dir2 !!!dir3 !dir1 !!dir1 !!dir2 etc. I use the '!'s to force them to show up at the top of the list.

It is driving me up the wall!

Well, nearly 2 years later there's finally hope. Upgraded to Windows 11 yesterday - and the folders haven't been deleted... yet... Whooohooo!

One person is using _ another is using ! for the first char of these file/folder names. I wonder if windows or some program doesnt like that

Using _ or ! to stop the random automatic deletion - or were these causing the issue?

SaaX said:

Using _ or ! to stop the random automatic deletion - or were these causing the issue?

my thought (no proof) is that it may be causing the issue

My disappearing folder names don't contain special characters, they are music genres. I'm using the folder structure to automatically tag new music before moving them to their final location on the NAS. That leaves the "genre" folders empty for a while and Windows 10 decides to delete them

Well, that didn't last long - Windows 11 is also deleting these empty folders...

Hi All. I am fighting this issue with a client. They are running w10. Data is on a w2016 server. So far we know that this is happening on one particular drive. What we did is to populate empty folders with a test file and create a folder with no files in it. Users leave their computers on and lock them. User that I am in contact with only keeps outlook open. They power down their computers over the weekend. So far we think it is happening early in the week. Time will tell.
Server has DFS role but nothing is configured. Running SFC on server now. C drive is 100% fragmented. Drive in question is 3% fragmented. All I have at the moment.
Anyone resolved this issue?

Nope, but I can say that it happens far less regular on W11 compared to W10. I haven't seen it in a while now, maybe a W11 patch that fixed it?

Hope you'll manage to find the root cause - good luck!