Copying Files

[Duncan_1]

I was copying/moving many large files/directories (~500 MB - 2 GB) between hard drives (physically inside my system, not across a network). System is Windows 7, SP1, 64 bit, 16 GB of ram.

Some actions proceeded smoothly, albeit slowly (my perception) but once the system just seemed to "go to sleep" (single instance of a 11.5 GB transfer) - nothing happened for several minutes and then Windows apparently locked up. Only way out was a cold reboot. Nothing lost.

Are there tricks to doing this more quickly? Does Windows not like big transfers?

[royw]

Hi Duncan, have you tried the TeraCopy program? I find it works faster than the Windows app, and is very reliable.

Regards,Roy

[ruirib]

I can recommend TeraCopy as well. Great, efficient program.

[Browni]

EIDE drives or SATA?

[enjoy]

Hi Duncan,

Is the destination drive formatted as NTFS? If not, files exceeding 4GB in size will give problems.

With the free command line tool robocopy.exe from MS you can see how the copy is progressing, and in which file the possible problem occurs. It is also much faster than the desktop copy.
By default robocopy.exe will only copy newer files from the source to destination.
With Windows 7 and later, robocopy is included in the OS after installation (in c:\windows\system32).

Open a command window (Open the Start menu, type "cmd", press enter), and use the following template:

robocopy "<source folder>" "<destination folder>" <file mask> /e

The quotes (") are only necessary if your paths contain any spaces.
/e means including subfolders, leave this out if you do not need it.

If an error is displayed, please copy it here so we can review it.

Kind regards, Eelco

[Duncan_1]

Thanks for the replies.

Yes, all drives are NTFS formatted. All drives are Sata.

Will give TeraCopy a try.
Will keep Robocopy in mind but would prefer a gui vs command line interface.