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Do any of the programs that purport to copy files faster than the built-in Windows Explorer file copying, really do what they claim to do? I am thinking of using ExtremeCopy and am wondering if it will really make a difference to my copying times.

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    You might want to look into TeraCopy - it's fast, supports queued copying (which should be your primary motivation for replacing the Explorer Shell's copying mechanism), and does have a free version. Jul 8, 2011 at 13:26

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Hands down the BEST large file copying utility in Windows is ESEUtil. Use the /Y switch. More info on the Technet blog here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2007/05/08/slow-large-file-copy-issues.aspx

Here are a few of the faster-than-Explorer copying methods to try (command-line based unless noted), somewhat in order of speed from slower to faster

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    Now if anyone has any tools that make copying ~3,000,000 10k files a bit faster, I'm all ears; All of the above are equally suck for millions of tiny files as far as I can tell.
    – Hyppy
    Mar 27, 2011 at 4:53
  • There's also XXCOPY, which has tons of switches, and RichCopy, from Microsoft, which can copy using simultaneous threads. It's GUI and command line based. You can use the GUI to get the multitude of switches you may want to use and copy it from one of the windows.
    – paradroid
    Mar 27, 2011 at 7:09
  • If you've got a 64bit computer and windows 7 you can run robocopy 64bit which is multithreaded and apparently insanely fast. Jul 8, 2011 at 14:31
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I don't know about that one but one that does indeed work faster depending on what you are copying and has stop/resume support is TeraCopy:

TeraCopy is designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed. It skips bad files during the copying process, and then displays them at the end of the transfer so that you can see which ones need attention. TeraCopy can automatically check the copied files for errors by calculating their CRC checksum values. It also provides a lot more information about the files being copied than its Windows counterpart. TeraCopy integrates with Windows Explorer's right-click menu and can be set as the default copy handler.

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There's a handful of tools that claim to copy faster than built in windows copy - i was about to name teracopy , but in this case, i'll take richcopy as an example.

Threading is one way to speed up file copies - in short rather than transferring files one by one, you can transfer multiple files at once.

The other is the option to not transfer files that are identical.

I also believe the method of buffering files, pre copy makes a difference in copy speed.

So, since microsoft themselves make a better copying tool than standard windows copy and xcopy, it is possible. I can't comment on the specific example tho

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    Threading does not help unless you are copying multiple source files spread out over multiple physical drives to multiple destinations that are also on different drives. If all of the source files are on the same drive, then trying to read and write multiple things at the same time slows it down since the drive has to constantly seek back and forth.
    – psusi
    Mar 21, 2012 at 18:11
  • RichCopy was discontinued in 2009, and it was waaaaay old before that. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RichCopy
    – ingyhere
    Dec 25, 2017 at 20:41
  • This answer reminds me of a recent spam title, GS Richcopy 360. Not sure if it's a coincidence, though.
    – iBug
    Feb 11, 2018 at 10:18
  • co-incidence. The real richcopy is a MS application and kind of a good example of what I was trying to talk about... 6 years ago.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Feb 11, 2018 at 10:25
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I'd suggest using robocopy with /MT:16 option (multithreading). It will help a lot with copying a large amount of small files, but won't help much with big files.

It's built into Windows by default, but it requires command line knowledge and has a lot of switches - that seems to deter most users.

If you want to use robocopy in a simple manner and you want it to behave like normal copy, you can check out my RCWM project - I've built robocopy into right-click menu to speed up my workflow. Hopefully this set of tools can help other people as well.

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