More iPod classic/iTunes/file renaming shenanigans.
I've been gradually renaming the thousands of music files I copied from my iPod to my Windows laptop and putting them in album folders, before copying them on to my phone, but I had a lot of tracks in playlists on the iPod so wanted to replicate those on my phone. I couldn't find any way of copying those playlists, so I had to manually make notes of all the tracks in each playlist and then manually create them on the phone. I also suspected that I might have lost some of the files I'd copied off the iPod, so plugged it back into the laptop to see if my memory was playing tricks on me.
For unknown reasons, Windows 11 sometimes doesn't really recognise the iPod and neither does iTunes, so I have to keep disconnecting and reconnecting it until it plays ball. After one such reconnection Windows said it could see the iPod as an external drive, but that it needed formatting. It's done that before and I've just hit [Cancel] and started again. This time, not only did it want to format the drive, but when I'd cancelled the formatting, it said drive D: had been corrupted and no attempts to recover it were successful. But then iTunes offered to reinstall the classic software, but warned that all data would be lost. So now I've got a virtually empty but working iPod classic, and have only been able to make notes of a couple of playlists. At least I HAD copied everything off the iPod on to the laptop.
So I thought I'd better make a backup of all the music files on to the external hard drive I bought a few months ago.
It only took a few minutes, but when I looked at the Music folder I'd copied across, Explorer said it was empty. I wondered if I'd made a mistake of some sort while copying, so I was going to try again, only to find that the Music folder on the laptop was also empty, at which point I had a moment of panic. BUT, when I asked Explorer to show me the Properties for the Music folder, it said it contained 4006 files and 393 folders. Then I had a look at the external drive and found that it also had 4006 files and 393 folders. Windows 11 decided to hide the contents of the folders during the copying process. Why would it do that??? And why did it successfully copy the iTunes folder, with the files that haven't yet renamed and copied on to the phone without making them hidden folders during the same copying process?! Fuck knows.