RichCopy – the Robocopy alternative

Robocopy or “Robust File Copy” is a powerful tool used by many Windows system administrators to copy files and folders. It was originally available as part of the Windows Resource Kit and is now a standard feature of Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008.

The powerful tool finally has an even better alternative – RichCopy. This is a free tool made by Ken Tamaru of Microsoft. RichCopy has been used internally at Microsoft for years and now they have released it to the public as a free alternative to Robocopy.

Performance improvements

The best feature of RichCopy is its fast performance, thanks to its ability to use multiple threads. It can be significantly faster than XCopy and even Robocopy. Rather than copying the files serially, RichCopy can copy several files in parallel. A user can specify how many threads to use for directory search, how many files to copy in parallel and how many threads to use for each file. With the right settings the time needed for a file copy operation becomes minimal.

Support for low bandwidth and high latency networks

RichCopy was designed to support low bandwidth and high latency networks through its built-in powerful error handling mechanisms. A user can specify how many times the program should retry to copy a file and how long should it wait between tries. Users can also select which errors should immediately cancel the copy process. For example, it might make sense to retry to copy a file from a temporary unavailable location, but there is no point to retry if access to the file has been denied.

Built-in timer

The best time to copy files is usually when users don’t need them. With most other tools that means you have to stay late and copy the files when everybody else has left the company.
RichCopy has a built in timer that lets you define the copy operation during the day and then schedule it to run overnight automatically.

Pausing, resuming and retrying a copy operation

The copy operation can be paused and retried in RichCopy. This feature comes in handy when copying files over unreliable network connections. In case of problems the process can be paused and then resumed when the problem has been fixed.

Various copy methods

RichCopy allows for a variety of different methods to copy files. With the Purge method you can mirror source to destination folders. When files or folders get deleted on the source, RichCopy will also remove them from the destination.
When the Move method is used the files at the source location will be deleted after they are successfully copied to the destination.
Another available method is to consolidate different sources.

Filtering

RichCopy offers powerful mechanisms to filter files and folders that should be included or excluded from the copy operation. Users can specify various conditions for file names, attributes and creation dates, and can set conditions to copy only files changed or accessed within a certain timeframe.

Graphical user interface

Unlike Robocopy, RichCopy has a nice GUI. The organized GUI makes configuring the copy operation a simple task. All the options available in GUI can also be used from command line. The command line parameters are listed in the help file.

Log settings

Operations can be logged to a text file and analyzed afterwards. There are many options that let users define how detailed information in the log should be.

RichCopy can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center.