Using RichCopy to speed up copying files
I found a utility that Microsoft wrote back in 1996 that some of you might find useful. The utility is called RichCopy and it was written specifically to work in an unstable environment that existed in the earlier days of networks.
Why use this copy program when you can drag and drop files and folders so easily? Well, for one thing, it is quite a bit faster (although the speed difference that you see may depend on your computer and the amount of data that you are copying). If you are only copying a few files or the total amount of storage is less that a few megabtyes then please continue to use the standard copy program that comes with Windows. However, if you are copying a large amount of data that takes several minutes to copy, then I think it might be worth your time to investigate this utility.
The latest version, version 4.0 has been improved to handle many situations where you need a lot of control over the copy process and you would like it to be repeatable without having to set it up over and over again. This feature is called profile based copy.
It also supports multiple sources, and file and directory filtering. You can set earlier or later options for whether or not to copy a file based on creation date/time, last write date/time or last access date/time. It now makes extensive use of multi-threading and it no longer has a limitation as to how many threads it can execute concurrently. If the copy is interrupted or if the copy fails for any reason, restarting the process will only copy those files and directories that were not successfully copied in the previous run.
My most pressing need for this product was related to it's speed in copying files, so I ran some tests on it. I have both Windows XP and Windows 7(Vista on steroids) on my computer. It runs on both OS's and it is interesting about the speed differences. I copied 600 MB of files from my Windows Server 2008 system. I made 1 run of each type of copy (not very scientific) except I ran 2 runs of the fastest copy to see if it was repeatable at different times. Here is the results.
Windows XP RichCopy 4:30 (this is 4 minutes and 30 seconds)
Windows XP Regular Copy 6:00
Windows 7 RichCopy 3:45
Windows 7 Regular Copy 7:00
Windows XP Regular Copy 6:00
Windows 7 RichCopy 3:45
Windows 7 Regular Copy 7:00
One thing I find rather interesting is that it runs twice as fast (almost) on Windows 7 as does regular copy. I think I can explain this. Windows 7 (and I believe Windows Vista) make much better utilization of multi-threading (multiple streams of execution for a single application or job). I think this suggests that other newer software that makes use of multithreading may run as much as twice as fast on Vista or Windows 7. It also is interesting and surprising that regular copy runs faster on XP than it does on Windows 7 (Vista). Although without more extensive amounts of tests, the results are only good for approximations.
The computer that I am running these tests is no speed demon. It is a Gateway E series 32-bit Pentium 4 running at 2.8 Ghz with 1 Gb of memory. I would not be surprised if a dual or quad processor might see even better performance differences.
This utility has quite a bit of options about whether you overwrite existing files, ignoring read only flags, etc. The price is right too, since it is free. I am including a link to the article from the TechNet magazine which also has the url at the top to download it. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.utilityspotlight.aspx?pr=blog
