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I'm setup on a small server farm with about 20 computers. My Job requires me to copy an unusually large amount of data to and from external HDs from these servers. I end up copying sometimes 3TB a week to and from drives (Sometimes More).

The windows copier isn't cutting it. Xcopy/Robocopy from command prompt force me to write silly batch programs to work correctly, and it's sloppy and causing issues. I need to copy several different directories depending on what I want, to a single place.

The selection elements/GUI of both RichCopy/TeraCopy were very nice. But both interfaces are extremely buggy when you start copying 1 TB at a time (Especially TeraCopy). RichCopy works perfect if it's only 1 Directory Mirroring to another, but the majority of the time this is not the case of what I need to do.

So my question is, is there decent copying software out there that can handle Mass amounts of data at a time? Not just large files, but Millions of small files adding up to be 1TB total. It doesn't have to be freeware. All of my machines are xp, except one centralized server which is Windows Server 2003.

jsmith
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To be honest, if it were me, I would work on making my Robocopy BAT files less silly and sloppy. Can you describe what actual problems you were having with using it? Those are probably surmountable - after all, copying files is exactly what robocopy is made for.

mfinni
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  • +1 Yes, I was scared that this was the best route. I think I just need to take the time to research and make a better toolset for myself. – jsmith Mar 05 '10 at 18:00
  • Good sysadmins will take available tools as building blocks for making robust systems. Sometimes, there will be a need for additional and/or expensive tools to get the end state. For most filecopying jobs, you can definitely make do with what's already available and just write some scripts to orchestrate the actions. – mfinni Mar 05 '10 at 18:27
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Well I'd still go for robocopy for that but, both home and at work I am completely dependant on Directory Opus as a replacement for the Windows Explorer file manager hence including multiple file listers and operations. And it can be licensed and run from a USB stick or similar without installation...

Some settings might need tweaking, like showing extra details in the copy dialogs that normally only pop up during ftp transfers - but can be enabled for all file operations. Also, all copy operations can be paused, retried, locked files skipped or whatnot and so forth... I use it daily for transferring a lot of data up to your volumes - though I'd still prefer robocopy for reliability.

Incidentally, as DOpus is completely customizable when it comes to file operations, I'd make it actually use robocopy for such transfers either always or by choice of hotkey/button/location if I had the need to do that often.

Oskar Duveborn
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