[SOLVED] Has anyone else experienced old folder appearing on external hard drive after transferring new folder to computer?

S60R

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Jun 11, 2013
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I am experiencing a really strange phenomena which I can't quite work out how it could be happening. Basically these are the steps:

  1. I work on a Samsung T5 external SSD drive
  2. At the end of the day, I delete a folder called 'code' on my main Computer hard drive (older version 15/04/2020)
  3. I then transfer a folder called 'code' from the SSD to my desktop Computer (latest version 19/04/2020)
  4. When I take my SSD home and use it on a laptop, I suddenly see that the folder with the date of 15/04/2020 from Step 2 is on my SSD and I have lost days' worth of work!
  5. If I look at the folder on my desktop Computer that I backed-up to (step 3), then the folder is dated as 19/04/2020 and has the latest files
How on earth is it possible that the older folder from 15/04/2020 in appearing on the external SSD when I am doing a one-way transfer from SSD => Computer. Even if we could imagine that I actually went from Computer => SSD by mistake, why would the Computer have the latest files on it of 19/04/2020?

This doesn't seem to happen all the time. Its just random and I don't know if its human error or something else. Anyone know?

[OS = Windows 10]
 
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Solution
I still remember a similar thing happening to a 32 GB micro SD card of mine a few years ago.
But things were much worse as it was defected and I had to throw it away - there were files that I was deleting, and then, later on, were appearing again - every time I put the card in my PC or mobile phone. And the new files that I was putting were all disappearing later on - acting as ram-like memory instead of 'static' storage. There was no way to force to it to work normally with formatting, scannings, any software or whatever.
You can run HD Sentinel to see if you have anything like an error or decreased health/performance of the disk and ssd.
Running a full antivirus scan with something like bitdefender/malwarebytes may show something...
I still remember a similar thing happening to a 32 GB micro SD card of mine a few years ago.
But things were much worse as it was defected and I had to throw it away - there were files that I was deleting, and then, later on, were appearing again - every time I put the card in my PC or mobile phone. And the new files that I was putting were all disappearing later on - acting as ram-like memory instead of 'static' storage. There was no way to force to it to work normally with formatting, scannings, any software or whatever.
You can run HD Sentinel to see if you have anything like an error or decreased health/performance of the disk and ssd.
Running a full antivirus scan with something like bitdefender/malwarebytes may show something interesting, who knows.
 
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Solution

S60R

Honorable
Jun 11, 2013
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10,510
After some more testing it appears it is a file system issue between the desktop and laptop, even though they are both running Windows 10?

Today I saved all my files on the SSD after working on the desktop computer and did not transfer or back them up anywhere. When I took the drive home to finish some work on the laptop, the laptop is showing the files with a date of yesterday. It also has yesterday's content in the files.

In a panic, I went back to work and hooked up the SSD to the desktop, and hey presto the files are actually saved as today's date and have today's content in.

This is the most bizzare thing I have ever seen. Before the SSD I used (and go through) several USB flash drives of all different brands including Samsung which never suffered this probem. I thought moving to an SSD would be more reliable but it turns out theres some odd file issue going on. Is the drive faulty? Should I just exchange it and see what happens?