A few years ago, I went and sorted some files into a bunch of different folders, which made sense for the time, in the process creating about 500 different folders within a directory to hold these sorted files.
Now the time has come for me to put all of these files back together again in one main folder. Is there anyway that I can easily remove these files from their folders and move them into a single folder without having to cut and paste from each individual folder?
(Gosh I say folder a lot)
Anyway, I want to go from x files in y folders to x files in 1 folder quickly and easily.
Get WinZip…specifially 8.0. This is what I have and it worked like this:
Don’t use the Wizard. Just open a WinZip window and have Windows Explorer or My Computer open behind it (I think WinZip stays on top by default). Highlight all the folders you want to remove the files from. Drag them into the WinZip window. Save the archive as archive.zip, or whatever you want to call it. Close WinZip and reopen it. You should see all of the contents of the folders, without the folder or folder names showing.
If you extract, it’ll recreate all of the folders. But if you drag the files out of the WinZip window into a folder, they’ll all go into that one folder without any of the sub-folders.
I can tell you a tricky way to do it. Under My Computer/Shared Documents you should have some folders. One is called Shared Music. Not a lot of people use that folder and I hope you aren’t either. You can copy all of your folders into that folder. Then go to Start — Search. You can select Shared Music as the search folder. You want to search for all files and folders. Enter an “*” as the file name search term. That will bring up a list of all the files in the Shared Music folder as a list outside of the subdirectory it is then.
You can select the whole list by clicking on the top one and holding the shift key and selecting the bottom one. Copy and paste into a new folder of your choosing.
However, there may be a limit to the number of files findable by Search (in Windows NT the limit was 10,000) and if you have a very large number of files found (in my case it was 200,000) the computer may simply give up when you actually try and copy or move them.
I was going to suggest this same way (use explorer’s search to get a list of the files all in one place, then drag them where you want them), but without the “Shared Music” song and dance. Why do you want to move them into “Shared Music” first?
