Dan’s Space on the Web

One of the few things in Vista that I actually hate is its file operations system.

To begin with, before doing anything it tries to search and index the files or something, to get info on it. This takes ages when trying to modify(delete) a large number of files.

Next, the copy operation is junk. Not only does it run slower than my grandmother, it is highly unreliable – often disappearing as though it has completed copying files when it actually did not. I lost a bunch of data thanks to this – I was backing up my files over my wireless network, and I suspect that the other machine’s wireless dropped and so the copy operation stopped and disappeared. I thought that it completed, and wiped my drive. Big mistake – I should’ve verified it first.

Anyway, that’s a mistake I’ll never make again – I’ll never use the regular Copy and Paste in Vista, especially on large files. Heck, I’ve even started to unzip files using 7-zip, because it takes an unreasonable amount of time to unzip files using the built in zip manager (which appears to use the same file operations system as copy/paste).

Enter Robocopy, my new best friend (for copying/moving files) and one of Vista’s hidden gems. Not only is it 102938 times faster, it provides you a handy log of the files copied. There are also a bunch of useful options, such as mirroring two folders to easily keep them in sync, or copying in restartable mode which allows you to resume a file transfer over a network if it were to be interrupted.

robocopy, however, is a command line tool, so you’ll have to open a command prompt to use it. you should also open the prompt as Administrator.

if you’re not familiar with command prompts, fear not: there is a GUI version of Robocopy.