You Guys should use Robocopy its the best

Thanks for the suggestion but since it will not copy open files and there no image based recovery it's not for me.

I find it really useful. I use it to save

• a backup of Documents on C drive to my E and F SSDs
• a backup of my entire E drive on an identical F drive (all music and movies plus backups of Documents folder).
• backup my Firefox Profile to C drive Documents
• backup my Thunderbird Profile to C drive Documents
• a backup of my Macrium Reflect backups on drive G to identical drive I

It compares the backup drive with the source drive, removes any deleted files on the backup drive, adds the new files to the backup drive. All done in the blink of an eye

Firas said:

robocopy <source> <destination> [<file>[ ...]] [<options>]

Robocopy

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Handy but hardly the best LOL.

It can copy open files with a switch added to put it into a different copy mode if the file is open then switch back to default copy mode to continue. One thing people tend to overlook is that Robocopy handles small and large files differently and ideally should use a different setup for copying each to maintain it's efficiency gains over the normal GUI methods.

As an example, to backup the Documents folder on my C drive I use a .bat file with:


I make a shortcut, you need to ensure that you set the advanced button and tick "Run As Administrator" otherwise as it is a virtual folder, you get gobble-de-gook on the backup drive.

I make backups of my data by using SyncBackFree.
Very userfriendly, nothing to do with commandlines.

So I don't need a program like Robocopy.

I've used Robocopy for years to manage my 7 day duplication of my file server data files. I keep a copy that is mirrored to the source for each night of the week. So, if something happens to a file, I can go back 7 days in my rotation before it's back to other full backups. It works well.

Out of curiosity, what's the advantages of Robocopy compared to copy and paste?

Winuser said:

Out of curiosity, what's the advantages of Robocopy compared to copy and paste?

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Faster than copy and paste in File Explorer because it uses multi-threading. By default 8 threads, but you can specify more if you like.

Winuser said:

Out of curiosity, what's the advantages of Robocopy compared to copy and paste?

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Organized, and faster, you have many Syntaxes to play with

Bree said:

Faster than copy and paste in File Explorer because it uses multi-threading. By default 8 threads, but you can specify more if you like.

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Thank you you beat me to it :)

I will never/ever use an automatic backup again. I lost my files twice, I prefer copy/paste, it is bulletproof. Onedrive for the rest.

Sounds suspicious, if you ask me.

Bree said:

Faster than copy and paste in File Explorer because it uses multi-threading. By default 8 threads, but you can specify more if you like.

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For small files I use File Explorer. For large files I use Teracopy and like File Explorer it's copy and paste so for me Robocopy would be a step backwards.

TairikuOkami said:

I will never/ever use an automatic backup again. I lost my files twice, I prefer copy/paste, it is bulletproof. Onedrive for the rest.

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My preferred method is to use copy and paste in File Explorer and for large files I use copy and paste in Teracopy.

Long ago I had a PC where there were some problems with the DRAM memory.
That was only happening when I was copying large amounts of files for backup purposes.

While I then already used SyncBackFree for some purposes and always used verification in that program, that program warned me that some copies had failed. But I did some less important copies as well by copy/paste in file explorer. Some of those files later on appeared to be corrupted. Far more later on I found out that the reports of SyncBackFree that files had not been copied correctly were caused by this memory failure, but then I already had some corrupted files on my system. Which is not nice if you have to rely on your copies / backups.

Since then I copy almost everything I make a backup of by the verified method of SyncBackFree.

It seems Robecopy has no verification options. Xcopy has that option (flag /V), Teracopy seems to have that verify possibility too (I only did a quick Internet search for that).

Winuser said:

Out of curiosity, what's the advantages of Robocopy compared to copy and paste?

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Lets' say you have a data directory at C:\data. Let's say that you have a Backup copy at E:\Backups\Monday\Data, and E:\Backups\Tuesday\Data, and E:\Backups\Wednesday\Data.

You can run Robocopy with a /MIR flag and it mirrors the source and destination. So, the first time you run it on Monday, it copies C:\data to E:\Backups\Monday\Data. It would be a full copy and would take some time. However, all subsequent runs of this Monday job would ONLY copy the changes. And new files and updated files on the source would be mirrored to the destination, and any deletions on the source, would also be removed from the destination. So, biggest advantage for me is super fast subsequent runs of the robocopy command.

This is how I use it. I have a 7 day rotation external to the box and it's mirrored with 7 scheduled jobs that run each day of the week.

Robocopy has so many steps. . With Macrium Backup and others, all you gotta do is one click and it does it for you, or set it to do it automatically at a certain time daily. . . we don't need any of this manual stuff.

The benefits of something like Robocopy are that it provides as much, if not more functionality than some GUI based options, it is very easy to customise scripts/ batch files & shceduled tasks to make it suit your needs and it is supplied with the OS, no 3rd party solution needed.

Although 3rd party GUIs with menus and checkboxes are popular there can be more unforseen issues relying on these, a prime example is Macrium going to a subscription based licence which is ok as long as the existing versions retain functionality, but at some point there will be changes to Windows that prevents older versions from working, maybe only allowing restores of previous version images/ backups.

My personal preference is to use Robocopy customised to my needs and not to use any form of compression, this way should there be an issue in years to come with proprietary formats ceasing to be supported or changing significantly my data will not end up useless or locked behind a paywall.

I am not saying everyone should be the same, use whatever gets the job done for you.