topic Re: Folder in CIFS share appears hidden in Network and Storage Protocols

Folder in CIFS share appears hidden

jsanfelippo — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:11:00 GMT

Please see the attached screenshot regarding an odd issue where a particular folder within a CIFS share is hidden. The “Emmerson…” folder can only been seen from a windows client when “show hidden files and folders” is selected and “hide protected operation system files” is unchecked. The folder icon is slightly different with the black square in the lower right corner and the attributes are showing RHSAO. When right clicking on the folder I am able to change the read-only and archive attributes but not hidden, it is grayed out. I also tried using SecureShare Access 3.2 but all options are grayed out as well.

The filer is a FAS3040 running ONTAP 7.3P7

Any help is greatly appreciated, I’ve been chasing my tail on this for the last day and a half. Thanks!

- John

Re: Folder in CIFS share appears hidden

radek_kubka — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:51:34 GMT

Hi John and welcome to the Communities!

I can be only guessing:

The icon looks strikingly similar to the stub Enterprise Vault lefts behind when the actual file/folder gets archived - are you sure it isn't your case?

Regards,

Radek

Re: Folder in CIFS share appears hidden

jsanfelippo — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:28:21 GMT

Thanks for the welcome and quick response Radek.

We don't Enterprise Vault in our environment and the CIFS share in question isn't touched by any type of backup solution. It's a file repository accessed by our end users via DFS link.

I had this happen once before and it had to do with how the files and folders were copied to the filer. I hope this all makes sense:

I used a program called SecureCopy (similar to robocopy) to transfer files from a server in our San Diego office to a CIFS share on a FAS3160 filer in our data center in Springfield, Ohio. The SecureCopy software itself was installed on a server in our Chicago office where it was configured to run the copy. Every single folder that was copied to the filer was marked hidden with that same icon and the RHSAO attributes. I was able to resolve this by deleting everything on the filer and installing the software and initiating the copy from the San Diego server.

In the case mentioned in the original post the data was copied by a user in the same office as the filer and I don’t have the luxury of deleting this folder and starting over.

Re: Folder in CIFS share appears hidden

mitchells — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 01:15:13 GMT

What version of SecureCopy are you running?

From the release notes:

FIX: Corrected a behavior where Directory not empty along with Access denied errors could occur when: (a) the Synchronize Target with Source option is selected, and (b) the attributes of the data set to be copied was both Read only and Hidden.

http://na5.salesforce.com/_ui/selfservice/pkb/PublicKnowledgeSolution/d?orgId=00D300000000xmc&id=50170000000PQoQ&retURL=/sol/public/solutionbrowser.jsp%3Fsearch%3Dhidden%26cid%3D02n700000001hLg%26orgId%3D00D300000000xmc%26t%3D4&ps=1

Re: Folder in CIFS share appears hidden

jsanfelippo — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:49:05 GMT

I had a feeling I would confuse the issue with the SecureCopy (v4.11, FYI) example, I apologize for that. That was the only other time I’ve seen this happen when copying data to a CIFS share on one of our filers.

Also, it appears that I was looking a little too deep into this problem… From a command prompt I ran the following command:

attrib -R –H –S -A “\\netappnas01\...\Emerson - Rudd 087886-0108\”

Now the folder is visible but it still has the black icon in the corner and a file attribute of “O”, which apparently stands for offline in NTFS. I’m still not sure as to how this folder became marked like this out of the blue. If I find how to remove the offline attribute and how this happened I will follow up to this thread.

Thanks for your help.

- John

Folder in CIFS share appears hidden

lagardejr — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:34:12 GMT

John,

Did you ever get more information on this issue? I'm experiencing the exact same behavior. Also with a NetApp device, also with copying using Secure Copy (5.5.2 in my case). Trying to figure out why it's responding by making the changes to the folder and how to make it go away.

Thanks,

Jason

Folder in CIFS share appears hidden

jsanfelippo — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 18:55:19 GMT

Hi Jason,

I was not able to resolve the issue using Secure Copy and ended up using robocopy instead. I wish I could be of more assistance but I just gave up troubleshooting what appears to be a software issue. After learning the commands and testing it out a few times I was able to do everything I needed with robocopy.

John

Re: Folder in CIFS share appears hidden

anton_oks — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 07:54:35 GMT

Hi guys.

Sorry, found your discussion a bit late... maybe.

As you already discovered, the strange icon comes from the "offline mode", which is set newer days from Microsoft "sync center/offline folder sync" and older days from some HSM solutions

You can use the attached tool to change (add/remove) almosr all Microsoft file attributes.

Enjoy

Anton

Btw: you can find it here: http://smithii.com/attr

Re: Folder in CIFS share appears hidden

cliffordnewton — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 14:31:33 GMT

So we had the same problem using SecureCopy moving from a Windows Files server to CIFS. We used the attrib command from Johns post and it worked like a charm.

attrib -R –H –S -A “\\<Path to folder>”

We still had the offline attribute showing up with the X on certain folders. I looked everywhere hoping this would be an easy point and click. I finally used powershell to remove this offline attribute and it worked like a charm.

$(Get-Item “\\<Path to folder>”).Attributes = ‘Normal’

I did find that the Get-Item cmdlet wouldnt work if the share was hidden which after running the attrib is wasnt. Im sure there are better cmdlets which will change all the attributes including hiddren through powershell. In the end this is what worked for us.