SyncToy vs RoboCopy vs RichCopy

On my old photo pc I am using Synctoy 1.4.0.0 to copy my photo folders to an external hardisk and that works just fine.

On my new Vista 64 bit machine I installed the latest 64 bit version of SyncToy however this version has a known issue when copying to external NAS devices. Files can get corrupted. So I only use it to copy from one internal drive to another internal drive.

But now I wanted to setup backup to an external drive too. But not wanting to take the risk of corrupting files I was going to use RoboCopy so I searched microsoft.com for it. By luck I stumbeled over a new copy utility called RichCopy this utility supports threading meaning it can copy many files at the same time instead of copying files one at a time and it has a lot of advanced options.

I am testing this now and wanted to hear if anybody else found this and is using it ? My first comment about it is that the gui is a bit weird and confusing with regards to saving the copy jobs.

Have you tried Karens Replicator?

TeraCopy was voted #1 in a recent hive-five on 'Best Alternative File Copiers' recently. Might be worth checking...

Moppie wrote in post #8466238
Have you tried Karens Replicator?

Nope.

overclicker wrote in post #8466625
TeraCopy was voted #1 in a recent hive-five on 'Best Alternative File Copiers' recently. Might be worth checking...

Well it seems like the pro version (which is not free) would be needed if advanced options are required. The other tools are completely free.

Roboycopy works well, I don't use the GUI. Copying with many threads over a high bandwidth connection (eg SATA to eSata) could slow things down as you're limited by the disk speed, not bandwidth.

Yeah I know that. Its a matter of tweaking number of threads to the optimum. In my test ysterday I tried 5 and 10 threads. The speed when using 10 threads dropped to a third of the speed when using 5 threads.

The only downside with RichCopy so far is that it does not save the source and destination which then need to be selected everytime it is run which also means this is not a good tool for complete automation.

As for RoboCopy I found it on the MS site as part of a toolkit for windows 2003 server. Is it a zip file with seperate installation for each tool or is everything installed? There are alot of programs in that toolkit I do not need. I just want RoboCopy.

I think you have to install the whole resource kit. The good thing about Robocopy is you can run it in batch mode, I run it about eight times to back up my various drives and directories.

Try RichCopy with 1, 2, and 5 threads.

You may also want to consider Second Copy, mainly because it can do versioning:

http://www.secondcopy.​com/

Versioning is archiving the back up by nth generation. So you would have one backup file and a backup of the back up file. This can be handy for preventing loss of accidently over-written files.

Downside of SC is that it can't copy Windows locked files.

Faolan wrote in post #8467994
You may also want to consider Second Copy, mainly because it can do versioning:

http://www.secondcopy.​com/

Versioning is archiving the back up by nth generation. So you would have one backup file and a backup of the back up file. This can be handy for preventing loss of accidently over-written files.

Downside of SC is that it can't copy Windows locked files.

This is not a free utility. The three I mentioned in my original post are all free. But thanks for the link.

Considering what it can do, and what it offers I'd say it's worth the price of admission. At $30 USD, it's cheap when you consider the cost of other software and the simple fact data is priceless.

I've been using it for about 3 years now and it's saved my bacon more than once. It can back-up the files real-time as they change, and move the previous generation simultaneously. This is both to my NAS and to the backup workstation.

Swings and roundabouts as they say.

Ok have tested a bit more on my Vista machine. Yesterday I tested on my old xp machine and the same test on that took more than 30 minutes.

My test is to copy a folder structure with 79 folders in total consiting of 10.780 files in total 18.959.039.120 bytes. Most files are jpg or cr2 but there is a couple zip files too one of them is 6 gb.

First test round is copy from one internal 1 TB drive to a second internal 1 TB drive.

With 1 thread per file copy: 8 minutes and 2 seconds
With 3 threads per file copy: 7 minutes and 5 seconds (this is the default)
With 4 threads per file copy: 6 minutes and 36 seconds
With 5 threads per file copy: 6 minutes and 42 seconds
With 10 threads per file copy: 17 minutes and 8 seconds !!!!

Second test round is copy over network from vista to xp.

With 1 thread per file copy: 24 minutes and 0 seconds
With 2 threads per file copy: 14 minutes and 25 seconds
With 3 threads per file copy: 13 minutes and 36 seconds

Thats not bad for copying 17.5Gb (ballpark) of data. What the average throughput Vs the fastest?

The reason for asking I just pushed 39Gb across my LAN and it took about 12 min. The only aspect slowing the copying was the HD speed. I'm using a pure 1Gb/e LAN/8k Jumbo packets and the NAS is using 4 SCSI 320 drives in RAID 10. Througput I can reach normally to that machine is around 80-100Mb/s.

Also what kind of LAN are you using, plus are you using TCP/IP offloading/Jumbo packets etc? As any times you mention are relatively meaningless without this data.

I did not write average throughput down. My network is gigabit and I use whatever settings that are standard in windows xp and vista.

It might be worth tweaking your LAN to see if you can get a better throughput, of course it depends a lot on your hardware.

Some good info here:

http://forums.pcper.co​m/showthread.php?t=464​211

Faolan wrote in post #8468817
It might be worth tweaking your LAN to see if you can get a better throughput, of course it depends a lot on your hardware.

Some good info here:

http://forums.pcper.co​m/showthread.php?t=464​211

That'll work great for XP, but for vista you'll need to see what window scaling mode works best (as well as the other settings there. some settings speed up vista-vista connections while slowing vista-xp connections though, so it may take more time than it's worth)