Can not find virtual copies in Windows folder.

Question

I can not remember to have encountered this before, so here I go: I just created a virtual copy of some photos from my summer holiday, and all works well. But when I needed to access these photos going the Windows' way (Windows/My Pictures that is), the virtual copies do not appear in my YYYYMM folder. Going back to LR though, they will appear there with a /Copy 1 extension. RIghtclicking the VC, then "Show in Explorer" will highlight the original in the folder, the VC still not being there. Part of the frustration is that I can not remember this happening before (or maybe it has), so I'm wondering if I by accident have changed any settings.
Running LR 4.1 on Windows 7 64-bit.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Andrew Rodney wrote:
richardplondon wrote:
My only point, was an observation that there is very little actual practical difference between a virtual copy and a "master" ANYWAY.
So you have 1 master (an actual raw) and 10 VC’s. What happens to the VC’s if the master gets corrupted?
If your master has say Adobe Standard as the DNG Profile but the VC has a custom DNG profile, what happens to the VC if that profie goes missing or gets corrupted? Try it.
If by "master", you mean the Raw file on disk, then if that is corrupted (something I have never yet experienced IIRC; although I still backup against this possibility) then certainly, all images derived from that will suffer. However adding VCs does not increase the absolute risk of that. The way I was using "master", was to refer to the one LR metadata set which, unlike a VC metadata set, currently asserts a functional link to the source file. If that LR metadata set were to get corrupted, (something I have never yet experienced either IIRC, although I still backup against that possibility too) then I might be glad of a VC which I could immediately promote to that role and status instead.
Certainly bad things may happen to a VC if a required external file is lost or changed - but these are exactly the same bad things, as if the exact same events had happened for the "master" version alongside. I do take the point that there is protection in redundancy - no question - and also that instantly written-out metadata is a useful separate backup of one's work (as I mentioned, I'd be glad if VCs could get the same thing too somehow, someday).
One-to-many dependency on a single source file can make some good things happen too,though, which may be judged worth any potential added risks. Say deliberate changes are newly made to a Photoshop edit on which several LR image versions are based. These updates will ripple through all virtual versions automatically; whereas if these versions had instead been fully independent, the same changes would need to be made repeatedly to get the same result; assuming one wants all these versions to reflect the changes; which is (should be; needs to be) the realistic expectation, when one has opted to use a cluster of VCs in the first place.