Talk:Robocopy

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Contents 1 Similar utilities 2 List of command line switches 3 Speed and performance. 4 ACLs 5 Suggested Corrections to beyond the built-in Windows COPY and XCOPY commands section 6 copy commands 7 Precision of Timestamps copied? 8 Robocopy GUI

[edit] Similar utilities

I've added a 'similar utilities' section. I know there's lots; I just added one of my favourites. I consider this would help those looking for a backup/copying tool. peterl 04:59, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] List of command line switches

This is absurd. Wikipedia is not every software product's manual.

[Why absurd? This information is helping me save a lot of data off a crashed Vista computer right now.] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.231.249.80 (talk) 05:01, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Maybe this belongs in Wikibooks. --NuShrike 18:57, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

For command line tools, I think the list is as good a way as any to describe its functionality. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.168.130.3 (talk) 17:44, 14 June 2007

I agree that this information is suitable for Wikipedia. The tool is very notable since it is an inclusion of Windows Vista, and is just as important as describing User Account Control. The list has grown command-by-command, put there by people who found a particular Robocopy command useful. I don't think anybody has simply duplicated the documentation verbatim. The fact is, Robocopy is the only Microsoft-provided tool that does many of these reliably. I doubt anybody provided any of this information if they didn't consider it extremely useful to others. It is no different than the Swiss army knife article describing each of the tools contained therein. Reswobslc 06:01, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

It's also worth noting that the history of productive anonymous-IP edits from a relatively high number of unique IP addresses is a good indicator that this article has been found useful by a large number of people finding this article on Wikipedia while searching the Web. Reswobslc 14:19, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Speed and performance.

A guy at my office says robocopy is faster than the copy accessible through windows explorer. Any word on this?

Reply: Yep, it appears to be about 2.5x faster in some cases.

[edit] ACLs

The article seems to say that robocopy copies ACLs by default. But the robocopy help says:

/COPY:copyflag[s] :: what to COPY (default is /COPY:DAT).
                     (copyflags : D=Data, A=Attributes, T=Timestamps).
                     (S=Security=NTFS ACLs, O=Owner info, U=aUditing info).

which means that ACLs aren't default.-06:44, 30 August 2007 (UTC)~

Changed article to reflect that this is correct. Reswobslc 05:59, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Suggested Corrections to beyond the built-in Windows COPY and XCOPY commands section

"Ability to copy entire subdirectories": 
This should be removed as both COPY and XCOPY can easily be used to do this

"Ability to copy large numbers of files that would otherwise crash the built-in XCOPY utility.":
"Large numbers" should to be quantified by the author. In my experience, I've used XCOPY on Windows 2000 with entire volumes
containing over 100,000 files.

I found COPY and XCOPY both failed to copy files larger than 4bg in (windows server 2003). ~~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.199.128.155 (talk) 11:42, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] copy commands

Unix/*nix programs (Also sometimes used in Windows versions)

• cp -- copy files; can concatenate files
• cpio -- copy an entire directory structure from one place to another
• cat -- concatenate and display files
• dd -- copy streams, files, or devices in whole or part
• head -- display/copy the first part of a file
• tail -- display/copy the last part of a file

DOS/Windows programs (Seldom used in *nix versions)

• COPY -- copy files or sets of files, binary or text mode, can concatenate files
• XCOPY -- eXtended version of COPY, for copying file structures
• XXCOPY -- further extended commercial program
• ROBOCOPY -- further extended version, included in Vista

Other specialized programs are used to split large files into pieces and then put the pieces back together.

There are no good standard programs to extract an arbitrary piece of a file into another file. dd can be used, but requires setting blocksize to 1, which is very inefficient. In Windows, the obscure program CPART can be used.

grep and awk are powerful *nix programs for looking for patterns in a file. -69.87.200.198 00:34, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Precision of Timestamps copied?

I'm afraid I can't find any documentation on the precision of timestamps that Robocopy preserves. In particular, it would be nice to know whether Robocopy only preserves the Modified time, or the Created and Last Accessed time as well (which most programs do not). Additionally, does Robocopy preserve the Created timestamp of a directory (folder)? And further still, I understand that some of these timestamps may include milliseconds--are these also preserved?

To date, I have yet to find a copy/move/sync software that does all of the above. Rather, the only program that comes close is WinRAR with its ability to preserve Modified, Created, Last Accessed and Folder timestamps. Agvulpine (talk) 07:03, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Agvulpine: I believe XXCOPY (commercial) can do all three timestamps, which is one of their main bragging points. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.47.61.234 (talk) 21:36, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Robocopy GUI

Does anybody know how well the Robocopy GUI works with the Vista version of Robocopy, as it seems to have been made before Vista came out?

Also, having some version information here would be good. I seem to have three different versions on my computers.Jason404 (talk) 17:13, 4 June 2008 (UTC)