File Has Properties That Cannot Be Copies

  • Thread starter Thread starter C and A Bredt
  • Start date Start date
C

C and A Bredt

I wanted to copy my Favorites to a flash drive to put on another computer.
Some of the files showed a message saying:

Property Loss
The File has properties that cannot be copied to the new location. Are you
sure you want to copy the file without its properties?
It gave me the choices = Yes, Skip, Cancel.

Any idea what's happening? Thanks, CB
 
CB

Favorites are shortcuts, you will lose some things, such as personalized
icons, etc. This is simply because the shortcut uses information that is
stored in different locations on the computer.

You can avoid this loss by using the Export Wizard in IE. Click File/Import
and Export. Click the "Export Favorites' item. Follow the instructions.

The Favorites will be saved in a file, to the location you choose as
'Bookmark.htm'.

You can use the same wizard on the target computer to import the Favorites.
 
The system is maintaining certain information about those files that can
only be preserved when the files exist at certain locations. When the files
are copied to a different location or to a different file system then the
system is not able to maintain that information for the copies.

Generally, if you later copy the files back to an equivalent location on
another Vista machine, the properties will be re-set to default values, and
unless you specifically know that some of them should have different values
for some properties, those defaults will be fine.
 
Thanks, CB
--
C and A Bredt
Ronnie Vernon MVP said:
CB

Favorites are shortcuts, you will lose some things, such as personalized
icons, etc. This is simply because the shortcut uses information that is
stored in different locations on the computer.

You can avoid this loss by using the Export Wizard in IE. Click
File/Import and Export. Click the "Export Favorites' item. Follow the
instructions.

The Favorites will be saved in a file, to the location you choose as
'Bookmark.htm'.

You can use the same wizard on the target computer to import the
Favorites.

--

Ronnie Vernon
Microsoft MVP
Windows Desktop Experience
Click to expand...
 
When you copy files from a NTFS file system to a FAT or other none NTFS file
system, there may be properties contained in the file stream that can not be
copied because the none NTFS does not support these alternate streams
(perhaps not an accurate description, but close enough).
If the device you are copying to was formatted as NTFS, then you would not
see the message about properties not being able to be copied.
It should be okay to lose the extra properties and still have the favorites
shortcuts work just fine.
 
The strange thing is that a few days earlier I copied my Favorites to the
same flash drive and did not get the message. I then added a few websites to
my Favorites and moved a few favorites into some of its subfolders, then
when I copied it I got the messages.

You're right - my computer is NTFS and the flash drive is FAT. My only
concern was that they wouldn't work properly on the other computer.

Thanks for the info, CB
 
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