How to Hide and Unhide Folders and Files on Windows 10

The most intuitive way to hide a folder in Windows 10 is through File Explorer. An easily accessible toggle makes it trivial for anyone to de-clutter their drives. Here’s how you can make use of it:

1. Open the folder or file properties
   

   
   Before you can hide folders or files, you need to right-click the item in question and select “Properties”.
   
   

2. Tick the file or folder hide box
   

   
   In the “General” tab of your file or folder properties, look for the “Hidden” check box and tick it. If you hide a file, that’s all you need to do. When you hide folders, however, you must follow the additional step before.
   
   Meanwhile, if you’re wondering how to unhide files and folders in Windows 10, that’s simple – just untick the Hidden box.
   
   Press “OK” when you’re done.
   
   

3. Apply the folder hide to subfolders and files
   

   
   A hidden folder in Windows 10 has two options: you can hide just the root directory, or also hide its subfolders and files.
   
   You may be wondering what the point of this is if the base folder will be gone from File Explorer anyway. The answer is that if you don’t hide subfolders and files, they may still show in search results even if they’re not easily accessible through File Explorer.
   
   In most cases, you’ll want to tick “Apply changes to this folder, subfolders and files” and press “OK”.
   
   

4. How to show hidden files on Windows 10
   

   
   If you accidentally hide the wrong folder or need to access one again, you can view hidden files in Windows Explorer with this easy toggle:
   
   In your File Explorer ribbon, click the “View” tab, then look for the “Show/hide” section. Untick the option that reads “Hidden items”. Your hidden folders and files will then display with a slightly greyed-out icon.
   
   

1. Open Command Prompt
   

   
   Press Start and type “CMD”, then click the top result, “Command Prompt”.
   
   

2. Find the folder you want to hide and run the ‘attrib +h’ command
   

   
   Before we can perform our folder hide or file hide, we need to navigate to its parent folder.
   
   For example, we want to hide the “Personal Files” folder. This is in our OneDrive documents folder, so we’ll navigate to Documents in CMD with the cd command:

   cd C:\Users\yourusername\OneDrive\Documents

   Now that we’re here, we can hide a directory or file by adding the +h attribute to it:

   attrib +h "Personal Files"

   Switch Personal Files out for the name of your folder or file.

   

3. Hide files and subfolders
   

   
   If you’re hiding a file, that’s all you need to do. If you want to hide a folder, you’ll want to run one more command.
   
   Though we’ve hidden the root folder, we still need to hide all of the files and folders inside of it. To do that, you can navigate inside the folder with cd "Your Folder" and run the following command:

   attrib +h /s /d

   All of the items with the hidden attribute will now be invisible.

   
   

1. Open Command Prompt
   

   
   Press Start and type “CMD”, then click the top result, “Command Prompt”.
   
   

2. Unhide a folder of file with the ‘attrib’ command
   

   
   In your Command Prompt Window, navigate the parent directory of the file or folder you’d like to unhide. In our case, we want to unhide a folder called “Personal Files”, which is in our OneDrive Documents folder:

   cd C:\Users\username\OneDrive\Documents

   Switch the above command with the path to your parent folder and press Enter. Then run the attrib -h command to unhide the file or folder of your choice:
   
   

   attrib -h "Folder or File name"

   
   
   

3. Unhide subfolders and files
   

   
   If you unhide a folder with the above method, you’ll notice that its sub-folders and files will still be hidden. You can remedy this by navigating to the folder with cd "Folder Name" and running:
   
   

   attrib -h /s /d