What is the fastest way to mirror a directory tree on a DVD to a local hard disk in Windows 7

Question

Recently I had DVD with a folder that contained over 83,000 files and folders. When I went to mirror this folder onto a local harddrive with ROBOCOPY I quickly discovered that more than an hour had past and only 20% of the files had been copies.

Next I thought of something faster but still not fast: I made an ISO image file of the DVD and then using WinRAR opened up the ISO and extracted the directory to the destination. That turned out to take some 20 minutes which for a folder of less than 1GB in size seemed extraordinarily long wait.

Does anyone know of a way to just "DUMP" the directory onto the HD to maximize the copy speed?

Answer 1

The way you are doing it is the fastest I would think. Though if you have a second hard disk, then put the iso on a different disk to the destination of the files.

That way you avoid contention between reading the files and writing the files on the same hard disk.

You might want to try daemon-tools to mount the ISO as a "disk" rather than using WinRAR which may be more efficient, but you would still want to locate the ISO on a different disk than the destination to avoid contention.

Answer 2

I use FastCopy to handle my large copy/move jobs, especially if it involves lots of tiny files. Just seems to work faster and more efficiently than the Windows built-in copy and even other 3rd party programs like Teracopy.