Old Windows Tool: XCOPY

XCOPY is an old Windows Tool. I remember that I first used this tool to copy files with sub-directiories when my computer was DOS based one. It is a nice tool to copy files. At my current work, this tool is also used to copy only most recently changed files as a way to back files. The option is /D/Y.

XCOPY source [destination] /D /Y

In the past week, I was working on a project to migrate services and scheduled jobs to a new Windows Server 2008 box. One simple task was to move a XCOPY job, copying files from a mapped Windows box to an imported UNIX based network drive. To my surprise, the same command does not work any more. It always copy whole files again, about several GBs. Somehow, XCOPY does not work for CIFS type network drive.

It is possible that the file date time stamp retrieved from the network drive might be truncated after seconds, while the full date time stamp are available in Windows file system. As a result, this may lead to always copy new files to the destination. I got this explaining from my SF question.

I also tried to use ROBOCOPY. It did not work neither. Finally, one of my network team member suggested me back to the old tool XCOPY with different options. It works again! Here is the command:

XCOPY source [destination] /M /Y /C

/M for copying only archived files and clear archive flag after the copy. I added /C option to let copy process to continue regardless of any failure.

The reason I like to use XCOPY is that it is more tolerance or not so aggressive. Even a file is hold by another process, it still does the copy. I tried SyncToy tool and it does not work with files being accessed by another process. My backup job is doing realtime file backup and those files are constantly updated by realtime process. Therefore, /C option lets me to continue the backup process and try it again on the next day.

I am happy with the alternative solution.