You Guys should use Robocopy its the best

The thing I like about using Robocopy is the speed. Using copy/paste to move 2tb of music and video files to a new drive I'd have to leave my PC on overnight. But doing the same using Robocopy it took just over an hour or so.

Using copy/paste for that number of files uses a lot of resources while Windows shuffles and moves files around. While Windows is thinking about what it is doing, it is not writing files to disk at anything like optimum speed.

But everyone to their own, use whatever you feel comfortable with.

DigitalGoat said:

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.

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I'm not sure if you're responding to my post or not. If you're responding to my question what does that have to do with comparing Robocopy to Copy and Paste. Even using Teracopy is just a copy and paste. There is no need to use any 3rd party programs to access the data.

Winuser said:

I'm not sure if you're responding to my post or not. If you're responding to my question what does that have to do with comparing Robocopy to Copy and Paste. Even using Teracopy is just a copy and paste. There is no need to use any 3rd party programs to access the data.

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I wasn't responding to anyone in particular, just adding my thoughts on the threads general contents and why I personally prefer Robocopy over GUI based options, and also my concerns over any 3rd party implementation of compression, ie Macrium as it was mentioned in this thread, with a view to future support.

I finally have a reason to put Robocopy to the test. I bought a new 14TB USB HDD to make an extra backup of all of my media files. I have over 2TB of data on the drive I use for my streaming source. Teracopy estimated it would take 1.2 days to copy from HDD to HDD connected to the mini pc. I started at 10:48 this morning. The command I used was Robocopy "D:\Media Files" "E:\Media Files" /E /COPYALL.

I am partial to FreeFileSync/RealTimeSync. After the initial setup, theres nothing more for me to do other than plug in a drive.

Winuser said:

I finally have a reason to put Robocopy to the test. I bought a new 14TB USB HDD to make an extra backup of all of my media files. I have over 2TB of data on the drive I use for my streaming source. Teracopy estimated it would take 1.2 days to copy from HDD to HDD connected to the mini pc. I started at 10:48 this morning. The command I used was Robocopy "D:\Media Files" "E:\Media Files" /E /COPYALL.

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You Can you the SECOND ONE


robocopy "W:\Games Folder" "E:\OLD Games Folder" /E
OR
robocopy "W:\Games Folder" "E:\OLD Games Folder" /mir

just do the whole drive to the other:
robocopy W:\ E:\ /mir

Or mix it up with the whole drive to a folder on E:
robocopy W:\ "E:\OLD Stuff" /E

thecaretaker said:

The thing I like about using Robocopy is the speed. Using copy/paste to move 2tb of music and video files to a new drive I'd have to leave my PC on overnight. But doing the same using Robocopy it took just over an hour or so.

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It's been running since 10:48 and it's not even close to being half finished yet. I 'm hoping that it's not going to be anywhere near 1.2 days to finish.

I just looked up the CPU specs of my Mini PC and 8 threads is the max so I assume the files are being copied at the fastest speed available.

@Firas, I'm not going to say that Robocopy isn't a good utility to copy files and folders but I'm not seeing any super fast copying speeds than if I were to use Teracopy. It's been just a little over 4 hours and I doubt if it's even copied a 1/4 of my files. The way it's going I don't see it finishing until sometime tomorrow.

I use it to back up my data, which is on a separate partition than the OS. Quite good, no issues. I have a script that I run that robocopies to external HDD drives. Since it is basically differential (I use Mirroring), it is pretty quick and only copies changed files. It was much faster than making an image of the data partition, but I should revisit that since they sped up Macrium Reflect.

Winuser said:

@Firas, I'm not going to say that Robocopy isn't a good utility to copy files and folders but I'm not seeing any super fast copying speeds than if I were to use Teracopy. It's been just a little over 4 hours and I doubt if it's even copied a 1/4 of my files. The way it's going I don't see it finishing until sometime tomorrow.

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Your hard drives are experiencing disk errors. Can you tell me their speed?

Firas said:

Your hard drives are experiencing disk errors. Can you tell me their speed?

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All I know is that they are both 14TB USB 3.0 Western Digital Elements drives. Is there a way to pause Robocopy or can I stop it and pick back up where it stopped. If Possible I want to check and see what USB ports I'm using. The PC has two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports and a USB C port.

@Firas, I went ahead and closed Robocopy and checked my drives. The source drive was plugged into the USB 2.0 port. Robocopy is running again and is running much faster but it's doing the files I already copied. I'll know better when it gets to the end of the files that I already copied.

A long as one uses SOMETHING, that's what matters. Since I'm as much concerned (if not more so) about my windows install as I am about my files, I've been spoiled by system images. Years ago my only backup was a manual one of my user folder. If something happened I was "OMG OMG OMG." 3 days later I would still be working on getting everything back like it was. Nowadays, it's more "Ooh kaay" 15 minutes later, back in business. So yeah, I'm very spoiled....and lazy.

glasskuter said:

A long as one uses SOMETHING, that's what matters. Since I'm as much concerned (if not more so) about my windows install as I am about my files, I've been spoiled by system images. Years ago my only backup was a manual one of my user folder. If something happened I was "OMG OMG OMG." 3 days later I would still be working on getting everything back like it was. Nowadays, it's more "Ooh kaay" 15 minutes later, back in business. So yeah, I'm very spoiled....and lazy.

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For System Images, Macrium is my #1 program. The other programs I use are good but IMHO, not as good as Macrium. With my media server I want an exact copy and not an image file. Now that I have both drives connected to a USB 3.0 port Robo copy is zipping alone. Because the source drive was connected to the USB 2.0 port I don't know the tranfer time using Terracopy.. When I'm done I'm going to start Teracopy and see wat the estimated time is. The first estimate was 1.2 days.

Winuser said:

For System Images, Macrium is my #1 program. The other programs I use are good but IMHO, not as good as Macrium. With my media server I want an exact copy and not an image file. Now that I have both drives connected to a USB 3.0 port Robo copy is zipping alone. Because the source drive was connected to the USB 2.0 port I don't know the tranfer time using Terracopy.. When I'm done I'm going to start Teracopy and see wat the estimated time is. The first estimate was 1.2 days.

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I don't know how accurate the estimate time of completion is on Terracopy to actual completion time but it should give some indication of the difference using a USB 3 port.

Robocopy is my preferred method to back up my data as on average it is approx. 40 - 90% quicker than using Explorer, depending on file types/ sizes being copied and the resulting backups are uncompressed, this means that I don't have to worry about support or cost of 3rd party software to access my own data.
There might well be other utilities that are quicker/ more effecient/ easier to use than Robocopy for the same use case, but for me this is what I have gotten used to and am comfortable with, a purely personal choice.

You can give Robocopy more threads to work with than the physical count of your CPU, there is a hard coded lower limit already and increasing the number beyond a certain count may help or may actually hinder copy operations, you would need to experiment for what works with your hardware. Microsoft's online guidance has some good examples on how to modify Robocopy's default behaviour, there are also some very good tutorials available online.

Robocopy handles small and large files differently and you might get better performance looking into this depending on the size of files and thier distribution/ segregation in the folders you are copying.

Hardware can have a significant effect on file operations regardless of the utility used, from CPU to disk controllers to the actual disks themselves, not all disks are made equal, some can handle more concurrent I/O requests than others, some have more cache than others or better control algorithms.
The point of this statement is to say that everyones mileage will vary depending on the hardware and software they use, just because one person says "XXXXXX app is the bees knees at file copies" does not mean that everyone will have the same experiance.
To that end I disagree with the title of this thread and find it a bit confrontational, whether by design or accident.

Robocopy is good, and for me is perfect for my use case, but for other people? maybe not.
There are a lot of other well coded and designed file manipulation utilities and methods available, experiment and find one you like.

Fabler2 said:

I don't know how accurate the estimate time of completion is on Terracopy

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My guess is that it's just an estimate and being estimated at 1.2 days is probably off by an hour or two. Maybe more.

Winuser said:

My guess is that it's just an estimate and being estimated at 1.2 days is probably off by an hour or two. Maybe more.

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You mentioned that you have approximately 2TB, and that's a significant amount.