Files

[NTFS] Items dragged into another folder are being duplicated instead of being moved

Asked by Elias Schütt

While reorganizing my folders I constantly run into the little annoyance that my files and folders are being copied when I just want to move them into another folder with my mouse. Considering that the cursor changes to a hand with a little plus symbol, I assume that this was implemented on purpose. I personally find it a rather impractical behaviour and would like to see an option at least to change it.

Edit: I just noticed that this behaviour only appears with files and folders that are located on an ntfs partition, is there any way to avoid this or would this qualify as a bug?

Edit2: As mentioned below this was a mount configuration problem. I previously set my ntfs partition to auto-mount using gnome-disks, apparently the configuration it writes to /etc/fstab is not very optimal. The following configuration resolves the issues I had:

/dev/<partition> /media/<username>/<partition name> ntfs uid=<uid>,gid=<gid>,dmask=027,fmask=137 0 0

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Elias Schütt
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Jeremy Wootten (jeremywootten) said : 		#1

You can certainly raise it on https://bugs.launchpad.net/pantheon-files if you wish. It will be triaged as either a bug or a wishlist item.

In the meantime, you could try dragging using the right mouse button (which should give you a choice of copy, move or link when you drop.

Or you could use the keyboard (<Ctrl>C, <Ctrl>X, <Ctrl>V) or the context menu to be sure what will happen. Remote/non-native filesystems are treated conservatively by default.

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Elias Schütt (elias-schuett) said : 		#2

Thanks for the quick response.
I am aware of the other methods to move items, though I still prefer the quick and easy way. Interestingly, my Windows partition doesn't show this behaviour, so it must have to do with the mount options I used to auto-mount the other partition on boot.

I will mark this as solved for now and edit in the proper mount configuration once I figured this out.