Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Robocopy

It’s been said that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail.  And for the last few years, when mass copying Windows files from one NT box to another has been a problem, my solution has always been solved with xxcopy. (In fact, it’s been so long since I’ve even thought about robocopy, that I’ve honestly forgotten how it even works and have gotten quite smug about xxcopy being quite superior!)

Here is a little command that helps when you must mass move tons of files from one NT box to another. These funky switches are important, as they help grab all the subdirectories, hidden junk, and meta-crap.

xxcopy x:\folder1 y:\folder2 /s /h /tca /tcc /tcw

If I’m feeling bitchy about hitting Y too many times, I like add the /yy command. At the end you’ll have a nice little report that tells you what hiccuped.

Often times I’ll find some cool little hack tool to run against a bunch of files, and that little hack tool does have good folder recursion features.  A quick kludge in these cases is to just have xxcopy “flatten” all the directories in the destination folder and then let my hack tool go to town!