This post is over a year old, some of this information may be out of
date.
This utility is pretty interesting if you want to do bulk copy via command line in windows.
This post is my quick reference on it.
robocopy is a wonderful alternative in Windows (though not par with rsync) available out of box, native command simple syntax and well documented (robocopy /?).
You can compile this robocopy operations in a batch file and run through Task scheduler to automate sync. It works! No more third party tools for sync!
Example 1
robocopy <source_dir> <target_dir> /DCOPY:DA /MIR /FFT /Z /XA:SH /R:0 /TEE /XJD /XD AppData /XD OneDrive /XD SkyDrive*
| Syntax | Remarks |
|---|---|
| <source_dir> | It is the directory which I want to sync |
| <target_dir> | |
| /DCOPY:DA | Copy Data and Attributes. |
| /MIR | It mirrors the entire directory tree <source_dir> in <target_dir> . It also deletes destination files which no longer exists in <source_dir>. |
| /FFT | This is to support FAT file systems which needs a tweak to support timestamp validation by copy logic in robocopy tool. |
| /Z | Copy operation can be resumed after termination. |
| /XA:SH | Exclude System (S) files and Hidden (H) files |
| /R:0 | Number of retries on failed copy operation. By default it does retry for 1 million times, which is useful in poor network. |
| /TEE | Output to console window and log file – In this case I haven’t used log file. You have to add “/LOG:file” option too. |
| /XJD | excluding Junction Points (symbolic link) of directories from copying |
| /XD | AppData /XD OneDrive /XD SkyDrive – *list of directories to be excluded from copying |
Example 2
robocopy \SourceServer\Share \DestinationServer\Share /MIR /FFT /Z /XA:H /W:5 >>
| Syntax | Remarks |
|---|---|
| /MIR | specifies that robocopy should mirror the source directory and the destination directory. Beware that this may delete files at the >> destination. |
| /FFT | uses fat file timing instead of NTFS. This means the granularity is a bit less precise. For across-network share operations this seems to be much more reliable - just don’t rely on the file timings to be completely precise to the second. |
| /Z | ensures robocopy can resume the transfer of a large file in mid-file instead of restarting. |
| /XA:H | makes robocopy ignore hidden files, usually these will be system files that we’re not interested in. |
| /W:5 | reduces the wait time between failures to 5 seconds instead of the 30 second default. |