File mover?

Hey guys I'm transferring about 400GB worth of files to my new hard drive. I know it's not very safe to use the default windows vista file mover because it might accidentally stop (it does that sometimes) and other reasons.

What's the best file mover?

I don't want to create an image or anything like that because it brings up unnecessary complications.

Thanks!

 

Windows Explorer works fine with copying and moving large files. You just have to be sure that devices and connections are stable and that Windows does not go into hibernation during the process. You might also want to defrag the old drive before doing this.

 

If your scared it will stop and you won't notice, hook up very loud speakers and if you hear a loud beep, check to see what happened?

 

Try this, found out about it on Lifehacker and they like it.

 

I guess Robocopy ("Robust File Copy") is what you want, and it's included in every default Vista installation.

Edit: and I read "File mower" at first.

 

teracopy is quite reliable. The most recent nightly beta, 20090531, will probably be released as version 2 in a few weeks.

 

doesn't vista just pop up with a simple "try again" window? it does that for me all the time if there is an issue.

vista file copying is very robust, and even if it fails, you can just continue by recopying everything and then say "skip" when asking for existing files.

dunno, worked great in my cases everytime.

 

Yeah, I have never had any problems either. But alone the fact that Vista has a software included that is made to securely move files with NTFS attributes makes me use that "robocopy" for critical copy processes whenever there's no specialized solution.

 

Never used it except for some scripted deployment of stuff. nowadays, i use clickonce for deployment so i don't need it even there

you're talking about robocopy, right?

 

Yeah, sorry, I've been talking about it some posts above.

I made it clearer now.

If only more people knew that it won't run any applications with one click that have more rights than any web-application with Javascript would.
Package managers with their local management are still better, though...

 

I just finished running about 100GB of files hither and thither through my new _Vista system, and nary a hiccup to be heard, including bumping into duplicate files every so often.

 

It works for me to (120GB transfers)

 

shall i now say "it works for me", too? for about 2tb of data at once? i'm in the move of all data on my dads home server to my home server. as this is not the greatest idea over internet, copy to an external disk, take with you, and copy back works better..

unlike macosx, the default copy mechanism of vista/win7 is great. normally never fails, and if it fails, your data is still available at the source. questions during the copy won't stop the rest of the copy, and the dialog always continues after asking or informing about something.

 

Robocopy is good program. Teracopy works well too.

The Windows Explorer File copy is very reliable, since NTFS itself is designed for reliability.

The flaws of the Windows Explorer file copy system does not lie in its reliability but in its interface. When facing multiple duplicates, it does not prompt you for an option at the beginning of the operation, but rather when it first encounters the duplicate. So for especially long copies (more than a few minutes) I use Robocopy or good ol Xcopy.exe.

 

I can only join in with the people who say explorer works well.

I moved a fair bit and it never caused problems - if it has in the past for you it may be "a non MS factor".
Tweaking, former malware "windows rot" (for XP) etc.

 

I also find Sync Toy 2.0 works rather nice.

 

I've used teracopy extensively, and it's hard to say bad things about it. I find that it frequently shortens the time it takes to copy (well maybe that's in my head, but it seems consistenly faster for large files). I won't use it for just moving small files and stuff around but for 400 gigs it might be the way to go.

 

I find it most useful for merging folders or moving lots of small files, which Explorer takes a longer time completing.

 

I've heard good things about Teracopy, but I've never used it. I recently copied several GB of data over to my new desktop and didn't have any issues with stopping midway or corrupted files. In general I've never had issues with explorer's file transferring (except for long transfer times in the days of pre-SP1 Vista).

 

actually, in vista at the beginning, it first scanned for all duplicated and other problems, an asked you. people then all cried how slow the copying is, so they changed it back to copying right from the start, and scanning for problems while copying (but it scans faster than it copies, thus the question-dialogs are actually showing up async to the copy process. while such a dialog is up, the rest gets copied anyways, and just waits then for the dialog-result for the final reaction.


what would make the copy dialog perfect for me would be a button "pause".

 

Agree with that.

 

Hey Jedi007. I don't think you'll need to worry about Vista Explorer crashing on you while transferring files. I've transferred over 200GB worth of files to external HDs and vice versa; and have so far not experienced any errors with Vista Home Premium.

However, I've experienced Windows Explorer crash when manually deleting hidden program/registry files on C:. I advise you do the same fix I did when you transfer your files which is to check "Always show icons, never thumbnails" on Folder Options, under the View tab. Ever since I did this, I've never had any problems with transferring and deleting files.

If you really need an alternative, the only one I know that you can download free of charge is MariusSoft Mass File Mover. It does batch file transfers and claims it's faster than Windows file transfer.

Here's a screenshot:



Hope it helps...

 

It's nice to be able to verify files after copy though. I've had instances where everything seemed like it transferred using just Windows Explorer and later fine a handful of files had errors.

Do any of these verify the files somehow after download (file hash or whatever?)