When you watch an online video, the FLV file is temporarily stored on your computer and then deleted when the video gets to the end. During the playback, the video file is locked so you can’t pause the video, locate the temporary file and copy it to a permanent location as you would do with non-temporary files.

Although I did manage to do this for some videos playing in the chrome browser, but a large file >100MB was stored in a diffrerent location and locked.

To be able to see temporary files you need to go to Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Folder Options and select “Show hidden files and folders”. To get there quickly, search on “hidden” in the start menu search box.

Now you can browse your user data folders to find the hidden files. Here is where I found the temporary video file for Chrome: C:\Users\MyName\AppData\Local\Temp Sorting by “Name” or “Date Modified” helps you to find the file which will have a weird name. Another place to look may be: “C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Temp”. This may have been the folder where the temporary files were not locked.

With the video having fully downloaded (progress bar completed) and paused before it finishes playing, you can try to copy the temporary file, but you are likely to receive a warning that it can’t be done since it is still in use.

Before Windows 7 I could use a simple unlocker utility that was added to windows explorer, where you right-click on a file and use the unlocker to copy it. But this didn’t seem to work in Windows 7.

What did work is a free program called ShadowCopy.exe. This makes use of the Windows Volume Snapshot Service which needs to be available on your system. I found this running as a service in the Windows task manager (press CTRL+ALT+DEL to access the task manager) listed as VSS.

With ShadowCopy.exe installed, you should now be able to copy locked files on Windows 7. Initially ran it as a batch file with a command like:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Runtime Software\ShadowCopy\shadowcopy.exe” C:\Users\MyName\AppData\Local\Temp\fla98xyz.tmp C:\Users\MyName\Desktop

i.e. the line above was saved to copy.bat and this was run from a command window (enter cmd into the start menu search box, and open a command window as an administrator {right click}).

Then I discovered that it works equally well when you open the application up from Windows as an administrator. Then you have to fill in the form fields for the source and destination paths, along with the file name.

Note that the time taken to process the file copy is 10s of seconds long, check the progress via the messages displayed at the bottom of the application’s window.

If you don’t run this as an administrator, you will get a permission denied error. Once the file is copied (to the Desktop in my case), rename it to something.flv and it should play in kmplayer or vlc media player.

If you have any questions or tips about how to copy a locked Windows 7 file please post a comment to stimulate discussion on the topic.