A mistake I make time and time again. When I go to copy mulitple files for backup purposes in DOS I always forget to create the directory I want to copy to first.

So I always end up doing something like copy *.* c:\backup but the backup directory doesn't exist, so it just creates a file which appears to be all the files I'm backing up put into one big file.

Does anyone have any ideas how I could go about retrieving the seperate files from this file I've created?

I always thought that merely created a directory, but didn't copy any files to it. If you copied the files, not moved them, and did not delete the originals, then can't you repeat the process creating a directory first? To create a directory type: md c:\backup (max 8 characters). If I have misinterpreted the question I apologise.

The command SubVersion described will really create a file and put all the files that should be copied into it. Actually, I don't know in which way DOS does this, I'm not even sure that's exately what happens. What I know is that the file created gets a size that looks like the size of all the files which were copied together. So, I guess is that, somehow, DOS really copies the files to that file.

It seems to me that now SubVersion deleted the originals, and needs to recover the backed up files from that strange file (which should be a diretory).

Well, I have no idea how to do that...

-- Leonardo Pignataro - Secret_Doom --

secret_doom@hotmail.com
www.batch.hpg.com.br

I am aware of this problem in DOS, I guess you should always be aware that the target exists .. or, you could use the magnificent copy utility called xcopy. Check its parameters, there's one which will create dirs automatically:

xcopy *.* C:\testing /i

There is not much you can do unless they are text files. Then you can use a program like EDIT (or Notepad from within Windows) to break the file back into separate text files.

The problem is, that there is not NAME or Size information to help in the process. Copy just appends the data into one long file with no separators.

If you have a listing of the program's names and sizes, and it is a small file, you could use DEBUG to break the file up into small parts and name them as required. But that is a lot of work and requires extensive knowledge of how to use DEBUG and program file layouts.

To avoid this type of problem, always use XCOPY as it will either prompt you what to do with the data or create the subdirectory entry first.