"This file came from another computer..." - how can I unblock all the files in a folder without having to unblock them individually?

If you download a .ZIP and unzip it, the individual files will be marked as the same zone as the .ZIP. Almost every time I have a folder full of "blocked" files, this is how I got them.

Before unzipping, click the Unblock button on the .ZIP.


PowerShell, available here, has an Unblock-File cmdlet that will do this task for you. To unblock all of the files in a directory, you'd issue the following command.

dir c:\mydir -Recurse | Unblock-File

Unblock-File doc


It's quite simple, NTFS attached a data stream (that IDs "unsafe files") to the file when it is just downloaded from the Internet.

Do recursively remove this stream for all files, follow these steps :

  1. Download the Streams CLI executable from Microsoft
  2. Put the streams.exe executable in your Windows directory (or anywhere that the system can find it)
  3. Run this line in the command line :

streams -s -d directory

It will then remove all of the data streams from all files recursively in the directory - you have now successfully unblocked all files.