I was making a website and had a html file called winch.html as well as a folder under the same directory called winch_files. I no longer wanted the contents in winch_files so I decided to just delete the whole folder. When I did so winch.html was deleted too. Confused about why this happened I restored the old files from a back up and then made sure that only winch_files was selected before deleting. Same thing happened. Then I tried cutting winch_files to my desktop to see if winch.html followed it and sure enough it did. I fixd this problem by just saving a duplicate of winch.html under a new name and then deleting winch_files and renaming the duplicate to winch.html.

I am confused about what happened here. How did these two files manage to get linked together? And was there an indicator that they were linked that I didnt notice? how do I unlink files without using my method?

That is weird did you delete the folder inside of windows explorer or another program?

i guess the moral of the story is, you should backup the whole directory in case this happens. yeah you'll have to tell us whether you were deleting files from inside a program like dreamweaver, or if you were deleting them in windows explorer or something of the sort. that will give us a better idea

I was making a website and had a html file called winch.html as well as a folder under the same directory called winch_files. I no longer wanted the contents in winch_files so I decided to just delete the whole folder. When I did so winch.html was deleted too.

This is typical default behavior. There is a setting that you can change on Windows Explorer by going to Tools, Folder Options, View - scroll down until you find "Managing pairs of web pages and folders", under that is 3 radio buttons that say:

-show and manage the pair as a single file
-show both parts and manage them individually
- show both parts but manage as a single file

The first one is the DEFAULT. If you don't want that, set it to #2, click OK.
Now that won't happen again!

Wow LadynRed, you just gave another reason why I'm a happy Linux user

LOL.. well, you know MS.. they *think* such a default setting is what people would want. I don't know who they use for their usability studies.. chimps maybe ?? I dunno.. certainly not anyone with a brain.