What's the easiest way to duplicate a portion of a directory structure onto an external drive?

Question

I'm trying to move a large chunk of data from one of our servers onto an external drive for delivery to Amazon glacier storage.

To do that, I'd like to copy a chunk of the server, preserving the directory structure. I.e. move this:

\\MyServer\Some\Longwinded\Path\TheDataIWantToCopy
\\MyServer\Some\Longwinded\Path\TheDataIWantToCopy\First bit of data\DataFile1.dat

to this:

D:\
D:\First bit of data\DataFile1.dat

Answer 1

You could use Windows Explorer to copy directories.

If you prefer command line, then xcopy should work:

xcopy \\MyServer\Some\Longwinded\Path\TheDataIWantToCopy D: /S

I am Linux guy myself and prefer Linux tools like rsync, and there is rsync UI compiled for Windows called grsync which may work even better because it is restartable (it would not copy files that already have been copied).

Answer 2

For moving large amounts of files or even small amounts that take a long time on Windows the robocopy command works well. Has options that let you resume a copy that got interrupted somehow or copy a few files that got added since the last copy without redoing all the files.

To mirror the directories and files from the source to destination use the below. Mirror will delete and add files as needed so can be re-run when only some files were missed, some changed or some were removed etc without copying everything again like xcopy would.

robocopy \\MyServer\Some\Longwinded\Path\TheDataIWantToCopy D:\ /MIR