Microsoft Remote Desktop (URDC) copy/paste file transfer issues

[Chris McFarling]

Microsoft Remote Desktop (URDC) - Windows Store version

Version 10.2.1810.0

The traditional MSTSC client worked pretty well for transferring files between the local and remote desktops using copy/paste. The newer URDC client seems to have some flaws however.

*All file copying references are referring to copy/paste actions.

When copying from local to remote desktop this works similarly to MSTSC. The file is copied locally, pasted into the remote desktop window and a progress bar is displayed. When copying from remote to local desktop though there is no progress bar, which is annoying but not the end of the world. I've also discovered that files are first saved to Downloads > Remote Desktop > TemporaryRDStorageFiles-{99081D09-9A79-4624-B0F2-5F9A6E65803E} and then copied to the actual destination folder. All of the temporary files in Downloads > Remote Desktop remain there indefinitely which isn't ideal. But the biggest problem I've discovered is that in some cases the file is downloaded multiple times from the remote system. It seems the larger the file the more times it's downloaded. For example I copied a 165MB file and pasted it to the local desktop. Before it appeared in the folder where I pasted it, it was downloaded twice. There was no progress bar as noted above but by monitoring Task Manager network bandwidth it was clearly downloading twice as much data as necessary.

I then tried the same test with a 352MB file and it was download *4* times! I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed/reported this behavior and if MS is aware and hopefully fixing it. This is clearly not a usable feature as-is.

[#2]

@Chris McFarling

I have experienced the same issues. My system drive was filled up with several 4-GB .ISO file I had copied from a server on my local network to my local machine to a large non-system drive. Like you have described, those large .ISO files replicated themselves into that location on my system drive, filling it up. When inspecting the underlying files, I see lots of other items that I have copied to my local machine in that same way. These files should have been deleted when the file copy process completed successfully, but there they have been sitting for several months taking up valuable [SSD] drive space. I had no choice but to manually delete them. I left the [empty] "Remote Desktop" folder in place. If this condition keeps up I will need to write a script to automatically delete future folders and files every day or week, etc.

[#3]

@Chris McFarling 

The progress bar does not appear when copying files from the remote computer to my own computer. Also, every time I copy a file, a lot of duplicate files are created under the Downloads/Remote Desktop folder.

Microsoft not resolved this issue.

[#4]

Is there a way to make this folder show in File Explorer? For me it's actually called "Microsoft.RemoteDesktop_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App" and I can not navigate to it. If I'm in the 'Downloads' folder and search "8wekyb", I can see all the TemporaryRDStorageFiles contained in it, but not this parent folder. I've enabled 'show hidden items' and disabled 'Hide protected operating system files', but I still don't see this folder. Why is it so well hidden?