Tips for copying large number of files

oceanclub

So I've just bought a new 2TB drive and want to copy almost 1TB of files from an old drive to it (neither are OS drives, just data).

Obviously I could just drag and drop, but there's no logging there for things that go wrong, problems if it fails half way, etc.

Is there an application to help with this process?

Regards,

P.

Lu Tze

oceanclub wrote: »

So I've just bought a new 2TB drive and want to copy almost 1TB of files from an old drive to it (neither are OS drives, just data).

Obviously I could just drag and drop, but there's no logging there for things that go wrong, problems if it fails half way, etc.

Is there an application to help with this process?

Regards,

P.

There is a file copying programme on ninite.com. might be a bit better than windows one

Moon54

You can get that program TeraCopy directly from their site here;
http://codesector.com/teracopy

doopa

I'd go for something like this (free btw):
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Or rsync if its available for windows.

But then I'm usually transferring files around a network so not sure how they work if its a usb desktop drive.

Cameraman

You could also try something like this :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/

would work for the original copy - or just as a check afterwards.

Gadgetman496

I use a free Prog called AllwaySync to do exactly that for my TV stuff acorss two large drives. It has never let me down yet

Open the Prog & it prompts you to choose the location of your first drive (in your case the one containing the data) then it prompts you to choose the second location (in your case the blank drive you wish to copy to). Give the job a name of your choice and away you go.

The beauty of it is that after the initial backup it only Syncs the difference between the two thereafter so is really fast from then on. It's extremity accurate too, it will instantly pickup up as much as a full stop removed from a Word Doc on either of the drives and put both in Sync.

oceanclub

Many thanks all. I eventually went with TeraCopy for this particular purpose and it did the job great, though the UI is slightly unintuitive. One nice thing is that it hooks into Explorer so any copies you do use it.

Copied the entire drive and did a CRC check on all the files, showing which ones failed (only ones whose pathname were greater than 255 characters did, which is to be expected).

AllwaySync sounds good for ongoing backups; I must check that out as well.

P.

Cameraman

I actually use the paid version of AllwaySync as my main backup program, and do occasional cross-checks with freefilesync. Belt & Braces

The free version of AllwaySync has some file limits - which may not affect most people, but meant I needed the paid version.