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I am trying to deploy a website from my desktop to my webserver and so right now I am doing this:

 xcopy C:\source X:\destination /s

My desktop is a Windows XP machine and I need to copy to a Windows Server 2008 machine, but this copies everything and the whole site is very large and it takes a really long time to finish copying.

Is there anyway to specific just copy new or updated files? I see you can pass in a changed since date but I wanted to see if there is a simpler way to compare against destination file...

Also, I am open to using anything outside of xcopy that can do the job as well...

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You can also try Robocopy. – joerage Jul 9 '11 at 1:11
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jul 8 '11 at 20:48

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4 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

From: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/xcopy.mspx?mfr=true

/d[:mm-dd-yyyy] : Copies source files changed on or after the specified date only. If you do not include a mm-dd-yyyy value, xcopy copies all Source files that are newer than existing Destination files. This command-line option allows you to update files that have changed.

So, with your example, it should read:

xcopy C:\source X:\destination /s /d
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the "/d" seems like you have to give it a date. as mentioned in the question, I don't have a cutoff date in mind. i just want to copy over new and updated files – leora Jul 8 '11 at 18:32
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No, the date is optional! Thats why it is in square brackets. Did you actually read that line? It says it does exactly what you want it to do! – Mark Jul 8 '11 at 18:36
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The only thing to be careful about with this answer is that the web server and your workstation are set to the same time! If they aren't both using NTP this could either miss files or copy more files than necessary. – CarlF Jul 8 '11 at 20:52
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up vote 3 down vote

robocopy is a good alternative as well -

http://ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html

By default Robocopy will only copy a file if the source and destination have different time stamps or different file sizes.

plus you can do a lot more - the mirror command is handy for websites where you are deleting files as well.

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up vote 1 down vote

there's rsync, but I haven't used in on Windows: http://rsync.net/resources/howto/windows_rsync.html

the way I normally use it on Linux is: rsync -avuz src/ remote:dst/, which only sends updates (new and modified files).

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up vote 1 down vote

Use the /A option. All the new or modified files will have archive attribute set.

Check the below link for details:

http://www.windows-commandline.com/2011/02/xcopy-command-syntax-examples.html

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