I just submitted a feature request to Microsoft.
I thought that the perhaps the Windows Explorer file copy dialog could be a bit more truthful and instead of displaying something like this whenever a user is trying to copy something over 100 MB in size through Windows Explorer…
…it should instead show something like this…
Just to be safe, I sent the above mockup directly to Bill Gates. I know he doesn’t run things in Redmond anymore but I figured he probably still eats a half dozen alpha-geeks raw for breakfast every morning and could surely make this happen.
In the meantime, I highly recommend that you find some other utility to hold you over whenever you have to perform a large copy job.
I used RoboCopy this weekend when I was forced to do an enormous one over a slow and unreliable VPN and was pleasantly surprised by how fast and robust it was.
Not only did it magically pick up where it left off every time I reconnected after a network failure, but it was even smart enough to only copy over missing files when I reran it this morning after discovering a few files were missing when I did a BeyondCompare sanity check (I didn’t know about the /R switch). I was prepared for several more hours of copying but I was greeted with this after only about 30 seconds.
Moreover, there are a ton of other switches that allow fine grained control over how file attributes and ACL’s are copied over.
Despite it being an unassuming command line utility that ships with the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools, RoboCopy would clearly make Windows Explorer its bitch if they ever had it out in a File Copy Death Match.
Of course this is but one of a million good file copy options. The ToolMeister himself wrote about his favorites here and his HanselFollowers provided dozens of other good options in the comment section.
Whatever you decide to use for your future large copy jobs, just don’t be a cotton-headed-ninny-muggins and rely on Windows Explorer.
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