Windows explorer

  • Thread starter Thread starter Michael C
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M

Michael C

I had to replace a server last night. I copied all of their data accross
using windows explorer. I really love the way you leave it to copy or move a
large number of files accross and come back half an hour later to find it 1%
of the way through saying "Thumbs.db" is a system file, do you want to move
this highly important file?". Or when you re-do a failed copy it says "this
file already exists, do you want to overwrite?". Couldn't it check to
determine that the files are identical and not do the copy? With all the
dancing paper clip style features we've got surely this wouldn't be too
difficult to implement. The other thing I really love is when it encounters
an error and just stops!!! It reminds me of a young worker who you give
something simple to do and they keep running up to you and asking really
simple questions over and over or encounter some problem and just say they
couldn't finish it so gave up.

Anyway, what I'd like is a program which I can just run from CD which I can
tell it to do a copy of dir abc to dir abc and it will report errors at the
end and give me a chance to fix them. I might need to copy a whole drive but
a certain dir can't be copied because a program is running. It would be good
to be able to close the program and then hit a "Retry failed files" button.
Anything like that exist?

Thanks,
Michael
 
if something like that existed i'd wanna know about it.. it truly is
annoying to stop copying files cuz of an error then have no clue what
you've copied already
 
BlastUK said:
if something like that existed i'd wanna know about it.. it truly is
annoying to stop copying files cuz of an error then have no clue what
you've copied already
Click to expand...

Yes, it was a problem back in win311, you'd think they'd have come up with
something better in 10 years. I can understand when they deliberately make
something poor to allow competition, eg their help authoring program is very
basic, but there really isn't any competition for windows explorer. It
wouldn't take a lot to fix this either.

Michael
 
Try a command line program like robocopy from the Windows resource kit or
see if there is a Windows native version of rsync. Else I've had luck
using Konqueror from a Knoppix CD (bootable Linux live CD) - it can read
NTFS drives, but not write to them, but is fine writing to a FAT formatted
USB drive or a Windows network share - and doesn't give as much lip as
Explorer does.

Josh
 
Michael C said:
I had to replace a server last night. I copied all of their data accross
using windows explorer. I really love the way you leave it to copy or move
a large number of files accross and come back half an hour later to find it
1% of the way through saying "Thumbs.db" is a system file, do you want to
move this highly important file?". Or when you re-do a failed copy it says
"this file already exists, do you want to overwrite?". Couldn't it check to
determine that the files are identical and not do the copy? With all the
dancing paper clip style features we've got surely this wouldn't be too
difficult to implement. The other thing I really love is when it encounters
an error and just stops!!! It reminds me of a young worker who you give
something simple to do and they keep running up to you and asking really
simple questions over and over or encounter some problem and just say they
couldn't finish it so gave up.

Anyway, what I'd like is a program which I can just run from CD which I
can tell it to do a copy of dir abc to dir abc and it will report errors
at the end and give me a chance to fix them. I might need to copy a whole
drive but a certain dir can't be copied because a program is running. It
would be good to be able to close the program and then hit a "Retry failed
files" button. Anything like that exist?

Thanks,
Michael
Click to expand...


Here's what you want. The command line 'robocopy' works great!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en
 
Michael C said:
I had to replace a server last night. I copied all of their data accross
using windows explorer. I really love the way you leave it to copy or move a
large number of files accross and come back half an hour later to find it 1%
of the way through saying "Thumbs.db" is a system file, do you want to move
this highly important file?". Or when you re-do a failed copy it says "this
file already exists, do you want to overwrite?". Couldn't it check to
determine that the files are identical and not do the copy? With all the
dancing paper clip style features we've got surely this wouldn't be too
difficult to implement. The other thing I really love is when it encounters
an error and just stops!!! It reminds me of a young worker who you give
something simple to do and they keep running up to you and asking really
simple questions over and over or encounter some problem and just say they
couldn't finish it so gave up.

Anyway, what I'd like is a program which I can just run from CD which I can
tell it to do a copy of dir abc to dir abc and it will report errors at the
end and give me a chance to fix them. I might need to copy a whole drive but
a certain dir can't be copied because a program is running. It would be good
to be able to close the program and then hit a "Retry failed files" button.
Anything like that exist?

Thanks,
Michael
Click to expand...

xcopy and its options?
 
George Hester said:
xcopy and its options?
Click to expand...

I'm using xcopy to do a secondary backup to a usb hdd but it's not much good
for copying an entire drive because it only reports what errors ocurred, not
on which files, which makes it fairly useless.

Thanks everyone for the replies, I'll have a look into robocopy.

Michael
 
Michael C said:
I'm using xcopy to do a secondary backup to a usb hdd but it's not much good
for copying an entire drive because it only reports what errors ocurred, not
on which files, which makes it fairly useless.

Thanks everyone for the replies, I'll have a look into robocopy.

Michael
Click to expand...

Yes the only reason why I suggested it is that you didn't want to stop the
copying on errors. You did say you wanted a listing of where the errors
occur but I thought your primary reason for the post was you didn't want the
copying to quit-looking for a response from you for the error. xcopy can do
that. You want more then that the other app is the way to go.
 
George Hester said:
Yes the only reason why I suggested it is that you didn't want to stop the
copying on errors. You did say you wanted a listing of where the errors
occur but I thought your primary reason for the post was you didn't want
the
copying to quit-looking for a response from you for the error. xcopy can
do
that. You want more then that the other app is the way to go.
Click to expand...

Yeah, in the case of errors I want it to continue but I want to see what
they are so I can fix them. Pity it doesn't just show the filename.

Michael
 
Michael C said:
Yeah, in the case of errors I want it to continue but I want to see what
they are so I can fix them. Pity it doesn't just show the filename.

Michael
Click to expand...

Well my issue was that the drive was defective. There was no chance I could
fix the error even if I wanted to. For IDE drives I've never had errors
from files on disk. The one I had was a SCSI. The disk had growing sector
errors and they grew into locations of data on the disk. Copy would not
work with CRC errors. If those are the errors you are getting I really know
of no way to fix those. Just xcopy and compare the size of the original and
the copied. If they are substantially different well that's a problem
depending on what it is you are copying.
 
George Hester said:
Well my issue was that the drive was defective. There was no chance I
could
fix the error even if I wanted to. For IDE drives I've never had errors
from files on disk. The one I had was a SCSI. The disk had growing
sector
errors and they grew into locations of data on the disk. Copy would not
work with CRC errors. If those are the errors you are getting I really
know
of no way to fix those. Just xcopy and compare the size of the original
and
the copied. If they are substantially different well that's a problem
depending on what it is you are copying.
Click to expand...

It varies, the machine that prompted me to write this post had memory
errors. The copy errors I was getting was from various programs and services
having files locked.

Michael
 
Michael C said:
It varies, the machine that prompted me to write this post had memory
errors. The copy errors I was getting was from various programs and services
having files locked.

Michael
Click to expand...

Oh wel in that case do your coping in Safe Mode. But what you experienced
in the later is normal.
 
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