Software for bulk copying that verifies.

Hi all,

I'm migrating onto a new machine, and need to copy a great deal (in both number and size) of critical files from my old hard drive to the new machine.

To do this, I'm looking for some kind of copying software that will do two things:

1) Verify by content after the copy to ensure that it's been done correctly.
2) Ignore (if told to) system files (desktop.ini and the like)

I'll be running the software on Windows 7.

Three things I've looked at:

Synchronize it!
Robocopy
Teracopy

Synchronize it! claims to do everything I'm asking for, but I don't know much about it's legitimacy.

Robocopy, from what I've read, can be hinky about reporting errors and doing checking after-the-fact in more recent versions of windows.

Teracopy seems to confirm, but I can't figure out how to make it exclude system files.

Any advice or alternatives?

Thanks in advance!

 

Are you trying to clone your hard drive? Cause what you mentioned here?

Would mean that your cloning and that would work but if your new system has different motherboard that will be a problem and bring what ever problem was in prior installs to the new hard drive. That is best left to new reinstallation of the O/S and drivers to avoid any conflicts from the old O/S and it previous drivers. I would say just reinstall the O/S on the new hard drive and reinstall your extra software you loaded onto the previous hard drive and then use a hard drive to sata adapter and then just copy your data from the old hard drive to the new hard drive to the right locations and rerun your on your new hard drive to make sure it sees the data and loads the correct info. That would at least insure you have the right setup and configurations.

 

I am not trying to clone my hard drive. Just copy selected folders of data.

 

Syncback will do all that you want. It will even verify the copied files.

 

I did a lot of research on this topic when migrating servers a couple years ago. Robocopy is included in Windows and works well. I used it to migrate user files from a Win2003 server to Win2008 R2.

One nice feature if you have a lot of files is that it can run in two passes. First to create directory entries for all the selected files, the second to actually copy the data. This writes the directory structure contiguously, reducing directory fragmentation.

I have some batch files with command switches configured if you're interested.

 

My concern about Robocopy is that while "verify on" doesn't throw any errors, some of the reading I've done indicates that it doesn't actually -do- anything in Win7. Is that wrong?

 

I hadn't heard that. I ran it on a 2008 R2 box and didn't see any errors, but if Verify doesn't do anything, I guess there wouldn't be any.... I know you can set options to force robocoy to retry if there's a network error during the copy.

If I *really* want to be sure there are no differences in two folder trees, I use a free command line utility called xdiff32 written by John Beardmore that will recurse into subdirectories and comare all files within the trees. It's pretty fast, and it works. I wrote a quick and dirty GUI interface for it so I could browse for the folders and didn't have to deal with the command line.

It used to be available at www.wookie.demon.co.uk/xdiff/, but that doesn't seem to be up anymore. Xdiff32 is 106Kb, the wrapper is 36Kb. I could send them to you if you want, just tell me how to get them to you. There's probably a way to do it through the forum, but I don't know what that might be.

 

Yeah, I'm not sure if the verify concerns are justified or not - but that's the Internet for you. Let me do. A little more looking, but if it comes to it I may take you up on that!


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