Is this the kind of question I can ask in a Pub? A poststructural Pub?
I often have the need for copying large amounts of data between different harddrives. It is not uncommon for Windows (XP home) to crap out halfway through the copy leaving no indication of which files have been successfully copied.
Anyone know a better way? What I would like is a copy program which copies in some sort of systematic fashion (folder by folder) and gives the option to retry or skip a file if there is a problem. An added bonus would be a feature to temporarily stop the process and continue later.
How large is your paging file? And where is it located? A small one could cause it to choke on massive file transfers. It would be helpful if the paging file is on a different logical or physical volume than the ones that you are trying to copy files between. Duh, how much memory do you have in the computer, also? Windows always needs at least twice the advertised memory if you do anything more demanding than solitaire.
XP Pro is a bit more stable. That might be an alternative.
As Ronbo said your memory, virtual memory file and multiple disks are factors. There are other factors such as disc fragmentation - do you run defrag often?
Hey there!
I won’t get into advice on your problem because there’s already some good tips, but whenever one needs C&F’s local Geek Brigade this is definately the place to ask for it!
I’m only medium techhie (web dev) and one of the first things I install when I get a fresh PC is Cygwin. I appreciate the usefulness of Unix shell scripting.
Consider using Robocopy. It’s a command line tool, which may be good or bad considering your preferences. However, it is designed to replicate large amounts of data from disk to disk over slow links. Lots of options. Best of all, it can recover from failures, retry without stopping the job and keep a log for later analysis. Easy to schedule automatically using the Windows scheduler.
Free from Microsoft. (Xcopy does some of this, but not as well.)
