Introducing RichCopy – your Robocopy replacement!
Alright, for those of you in the know, we all know that RichCopy isn’t anything new. Infact it’s been being used internally at Microsoft for the past 10 years – however after a near decade of ‘Seriously?! We haven’t released this to the public?!’ it is indeed now available! There’s a whole slew of details at others blogs RichCopy Build 4.0.216 has been posted to the Microsoft Download Center and the TechNet Magazine article Utility Spotlight RichCopy and especially, be sure to visit the creator of this amazing tool Ken Tamaru’s blog!
So, what is this amazing tool?! It’s free first of all! And allows you even more granular control over your copy processes, including multi-threaded copy operations!
As you can see here in this image, I’m copying a number of various sized files in different locations simultaneously! Though one of the major perks is not in the initial copy, but instead in the situation of changed file copies (in our common “what’s changed incremental” model? :) Well, notes about that, taken verbatim from Ken’s blog show:
|
There must be many users who use RichCopy to copy only updated files. Most of users assign only 1 thread for directory search; however you can dramatically accelerate the performance of source and destination comparison by assigning multiple threads, especially this works well when files are distributed to multiple directories as RichCopy assign 1 thread to each directory search, not a tree. Here is an example. (local to local, but different storage) (1 million files in source and destination) |
Hands down, one of the coolest things is the level of options you can set.
The specific options I’d like to highlight are number of threads you can assign to specific operations. That way you can increase not only the number of directories you traverse looking for files (or changed files) but also the number of files you can copy simultaneously! This is a lifesaver when you’re copying many small files which when operating sequentially tends to take a lifetime!
I did run a number of speed tests on my machine, however speeds when run from my SSD tend to suffer, compared to if I were copying from say, one SAN to another SAN (something more realistic especially in a migration scenario)
In any sense, it’s a great tool, which operates via CLI or GUI and I’ll be sure to use or introduce it into my future migration opportunities as applicable :) Oh and be sure to click on any instance of “RichCopy” in this post in order to get a direct link to its download! :)