Merge folders

[stackrainer]

I made a backup of my SSD from a windows 7 computer since I was having problems and needed to reformat. Anyway, I need to merge 855 folders. Is there a quick way of doing this without renaming them all manually and having windows merge them?

[ClayMeow]

I'm confused on what you're asking.

 

Windows can merge folders by default. When you paste folders into a drive/directory that already has identically named folders, it'll ask you if you want to merge, and then when you click yes, you can choose whether you want to overwrite existing files, rename files, or not copy over duplicates at all. It sounds like you'd want the latter.

[SpikeSoprano]

Well you could just make 1 new folder, name it, and drag and drop all the other folders into it. Not sure if that's what your looking for.

[stackrainer]

Maybe I didn't explain it well enough. Basically windows separated all of my files during the backup and put them into compressed folders. I guess my new question would be is how can I extract them all out of the individual folders and put them into one big folder? here's a screenshot of what my backup folders look like.  

[ClayMeow]

Well if they were made with the Windows tool, they should be restorable through that as well. Otherwise, you could try a program like WinRAR, but without knowing how the files within the backups are distributed, I couldn't really tell you. WinRAR provides plenty of extraction options though.

[SpikeSoprano]

Was there not a setting on the backup software to not compress anything, it dose that by default to make the image smaller.

[WhenKittensATK]

Did you upgrade to Windows 8? Not sure if Win 7 and 8 did their backups the same or not. Go to  Control Panel ->File History->Restore personal files on Win 8.

 

Win 7: Control Panel->System & Maintenance->Backup and Restore->Restore my Files.

 

These instructions are all assuming you used the built-in backup program by Windows.

Edited December 16, 2013 by AZNguyen