If you use Microsoft Windows (XP or some later version), and don’t have an allergic reaction to the command line, you should know about Robocopy. Robocopy (“robust file copy”) is a command-line program from Microsoft that copies collections of files from one place to another in an efficient way. Robocopy is included in Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008. Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 users can download Robocopy for free from Microsoft as part of the Windows Server 2003 “Resource Kit Tools”.
Robocopy copies files, like the COPY command, but Robocopy will only copy a file if the source and destination have different time stamps or different file sizes. Robocopy is nowhere near as capable as the Unix/Linux “rsync” command, but for some tasks it suffices. Robocopy will not copy files that are currently open (by default it will repeatedly retry copying them), it can only do one-way mirroring (not bi-directional synchronization), it can only copy mounted filesystems, and it’s foolish about how it copies across a network (it copies the whole file, not just the changed parts). Anyway, you invoke it at the command line like this:
ROBOCOPY Source Destination OPTIONS
So, here’s an example of copying everything from “c:\data” to “q:\data”:
robocopy c:\data u:\data /MIR /NDL /R:20
To do this on an automated schedule in Windows XP, put your commands into a text file with a name ending in “.bat” and select Control Panel-> Scheduled Tasks-> Add Scheduled Task. Select your text file to run, have it run “daily”. You would think that you can’t run it more than once a day this way, but that’s actually not true. Click on “Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish” and then press Finish. Now select the “Schedule” tab. Set it to start at some time when you’re probably using the computer, click on “Advanced”, and set “repeat task” so it will run (say, every hour with a duration of 2 hours). Then click on “Show multiple schedules”, click “new”, and then select “At system startup”. Now it will make copies on startup AND every hour. You may want to go to the “Settings” tab and tweak it further. You can use Control Panel-> Scheduled tasks to change the schedule or other settings.
A GUI for Robocopy is available. An alternative to Robocopy is SyncToy; SyncToy has a GUI, but Microsoft won’t support it, I’ve had reliability and speed problems with it, and SyncToy has a nasty bug in its “Echo” mode… so I don’t use it. I suspect the Windows Vista and Windows 7 synchronization tools might make Robocopy a less useful, but I find that the Windows XP synchronization tools are terrible… making using Robocopy a better approach. There are a boatload of applications out there that do one-way or two-way mirroring, including ports of rsync, but getting them installed in some security-conscious organizations can be difficult.
Of course, if you’re using Unix/Linux, then use rsync and be happy. Rsync usually comes with Unix/Linux, and rsync is leaps-and-bounds better than robocopy. But not everyone has that option.
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