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Short story: one of my computers died (boot partition is corrupt I think), so I ripped out out the C: drive, plugged it into my other PC, and now I'm trying to get the files off before I reformat it.

I've been using TerraCopy to move the files over. I started a transfer last night, but it got about 5% in. When I checked it this morning it said it was still transferring at 25 MB/s but I could see that it wasn't moving.

I need a robust way to copy the remaining files, skipping already successfully copied files, that won't crap out on me part way through. There's tons and tons of little files, but the total amount of data is relatively small (25 GB).

I can't do a full harddrive mirror ('sector copy' I think it's called?) because my destination SSD has some other files on it too.

Suggestions?

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  • Your current method is the "fastest" way, if its slow, then you won't be able to copy the files faster because of a hardware problem. I am going to guess there is more to the "corrupt boot partition" then you might realize.
    – Ramhound
    Jul 16, 2015 at 15:54
  • @Ramhound Dunno. I ran chkdsk on it. The drive is "healthy". There were some blocks that were empty that were reporting has having files (or vice versa) but I think chkdsk fixed those. That drive is only about 3 years old I think. Regardless; TerraCopy shouldn't just stall. It should report an error or skip it. I just want to get as much off as I can; those files aren't even critical, just nice to have.
    – mpen
    Jul 16, 2015 at 16:03
  • 2
    moving huge amounts of small files in Windows has always been problematic. Make sure virus scanners are off and work in batches.
    – Keltari
    Jul 16, 2015 at 16:04

4 Answers 4

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Use robocopy, but make sure to use /MT option which forces it to run multiple copies in parallel. This improves performance dramatically when there's a lot of smaller files, which seems to be the case.

But as others have said, it might be that the slow speed is due to hardware issues, so the first order of business should be checking S.M.A.R.T. status of both drives using something like this. If all checks out, then do the actual copying with robocopy /mir /mt.

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I've used SyncBack Free for file backup and sync: http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

It has many file comparison options and should do exactly what you need.

To check your drive's health I recommend CrystalDiskInfo: http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

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I use Delta Copy for my backup needs. It's basically rsync for Windows and can be configured to run periodically. Since it uses rsync, it's smart enough to only backup changes in files, and not everything all the time.

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I use TeraCopy myself because you can easily resume your copy if it fails. But if you need something that works great and is also robust, use Windows' built in copy function called Robocopy. Its a commandline tool that will copy everything you need.

The syntax would be:

robocopy "source" "destination" /E /COPYALL /MIR /XO

This will make an exact copy at the destination of the source, including removing files at destination that source does not have. (great for automated backup scripts too)

Also, if a file exists at destination and at source, it will skip the file, and thus its great to resume a failed copy.

Also note that if the destination is a subdirectory, only the files in that subdirectory would be an exact mirror so your other files will be left in tact.

For example:

robocopy "c:\" "d:\old c drive" /E /COPYALL /MIR /XO
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