Fastest copy for multiple gigs?

[SIMMS7400]

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[aGerman]

ROBOCOPY should be absolutely okay. Depends on what your settings are, the limits of your network and hardware, what your backup strategy is. Since you didn't show us your ROBOCOPY command we can only guess.

- ROBOCOPY already works multithreaded (8 threads by default). You may consider to change the number of threads using /MT
- Of course multithreading doesn't help much if you have slow HDDs or a slow network in place. If that is your bottleneck then also other programs can't be more quick.
- ROBOCOPY always tries to copy files multiple times if it was not able to copy them in the first place. By default it tries a million times and waits 30s in between. Have a look at your /R and /W settings.
- Consider to copy new files and files that have been changed only. ROBOCOPY will do that by default, provided you copy to the same destination. It may be sufficient to save a full backup once a week or once a month beside of that.

Steffen

[elzooilogico]

Are you running it from task sheduler?

If the answer is no, skip this post. If yes, I've faced the same copying up a database of 3Gb from NAS Storage to an alternative server to perform a RESTORE over it.

Both systems are Windows Server 2008R2. Either XCOPY or ROBOCOPY take more than an hour to copy the database backup file, so as it grows, I'd to adjust the restore task run time to wait until copy task ends. When I run copy task interactive, the copy is performed in more or less 12 minutes.

By default tasks are created with a priority level of 7. Thats is BELOW_NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS, whereas 4 is NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS. Aha!!!
So I went to System administration, task Sheduler, and export the task to an XML file. Above the Action section, I found <Priority>7</Priority>. I changed it to <Priority>4</Priority>,delete the task and import the task XML file, Voila!!. Now copy task runs at the same speed as interactive.

see TaskSettings.Priority property

Hope it helps.

[SIMMS7400]

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[aGerman]

I already gave you some hints but of course we don't work with the same environment as you. You should study the options that ROBOCOPY provides and then do some tests in order to find the settings that fit best for your tasks.

Steffen

[SIMMS7400]

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[aGerman]

Would it be best ot replace all instances with ROBOCOPY?

Yes most likely. Not only that XCOPY doesn't work with multi-threading to increase the performance. It also doesn't retry if files were not copied correctly.

Steffen