XCopy or Robocopy?

[TBlax]

Hi all,

Our SENCO woman has asked me if there was a way she could backup her External HDD to a folder as she now has a Deputy SENCO role that's not long been filled and they need to share files. She told me that at the other school she works at they gave her a batch file that just copies the drive to a directory somewhere. I knew about XCopy already, which is what I assumed she was on about, and was half-way doing the command line for it until I noticed there's also something called Robocopy.exe

So just asking: Which is better/which one should I use? I looked at the robocopy.exe /? and there's a great big list of flags compared to XCopy but I've got no idea which one I'd be better off using. If anybody can tell me I'd appreciate it, or if they know of any better solutions I'd appreciate that too.

[Michael]

They're very similar, but Robocopy just gives you additional options as you mentioned. I'd suggest you use whatever solution you think is best.

[Ric_]

Robocopy is more robust. It allows you to copy just differences and will work multi-threaded if you so desire.

[psydii]

Robocopy is much slower, because it is more robust.

Also (and this has no impact on xcopy vs robocopy) -- is that external disk encrypted? It needs to be if it contains SEN information about students.

[andydis]

warning XCOPY tends to fail (alot) with the error "not enough memory" if theres alot of DATA in my experience, best use robocopy, never let me down.

[TBlax]

Thanks for your input everyone, I will try Robocopy and see how she gets on with it.

Also (and this has no impact on xcopy vs robocopy) -- is that external disk encrypted? It needs to be if it contains SEN information about students.

Yeah, it's encrypted. It was me that put the order through for it we make sure any External HDD we buy has hardware encryption on it, mainly because some of the staff here can't be trusted to keep a standard one safe. Yeah, we're very lovely

Unfortunately they refused to buy one of those fancy ones with the keypad/code entry thing on them though, I would've loved to have a play with one of those. Blast

[Ric_]

Robocopy is much slower, because it is more robust.

Not strictly true... it depends upon what you are doing. Also, multiple threads tend to be quicker than one if your connection isn't saturated.