[geeks] Help: Copying an entire drive under Windows?

[Dan Sikorski]

Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 09:17:06AM -0400, Dan Sikorski wrote:
>   
>> This isn't quite what you are asking for, but may get you what you need:  
>> The bundled windows backup utility in vista creates a .vhd file, which is 
>> Virtual PC's hard disk format.  That file will not be bootable in VPC 
>> AFAIK, but it can be mounted in a virtual machine.
>>     
>
> Unfortunately I need to be able to have the external disk so that the user
> can just plug it in and copy files via drag-n-drop if necessary.  
>
> One of the rsyncs or synctoy will do what I need..
>   

Robocopy is in vista as well, just make sure that you use switches to 
adjust retries/timeout or it will never finish when it gets to a locked 
file.

Going on a tangent, has anyone ever had to move or copy large numbers of 
files in windows?  I have a file server with a couple of TB in small 
(varying in size from say 10kb to 5mb) files, and doing anything with 
those folders is...  interesting. 

One thing I've learned is that as long as you don't have any 
applications that require it, disabling 8.3 filename generation can be a 
huge performance benefit on creation of files.  I was dealing with a 
number of directories that have from 100k to a million or more files, 
and all of the filenames start with a date/time stamp of 
YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.  Because of this, the generated short file name would be 
YYYYM~xx, which, obviously would have a lot of conflicts.  It would take 
a few SECONDS of CPU time to create a file until short file name 
generation was disabled.  Multiply that by a few hundred thousand files, 
and you have a copy or restore job that will never finish, despite the 
fact that you are only moving a few gigabytes.  
(http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005/02/08/NTFS_Hacks.html)

Even with that taken care of, there are still other issues.  For one, 
trying to copy a directory with about a million files, I first tried 
simple copy/paste in windows explorer.  It ran for a few hours, gave an 
error and stopped.  Xcopy did the same.  Robocopy ran for many hours 
(12+) without copying a single file before i killed it.  I have now been 
using windows backup and backup exec to back up the folders to disk or 
tape and restore them. 

All of the files on this server are .tif files for a document imaging 
system.  Windows explorer sees this and decides that it would be great 
to use a tile or filmstrip view to show that folder.  It's a good way to 
cause explorer to stop responding if you don't catch it quickly and 
change it to a more reasonable display mode.  This behavior might seem 
reasonable for "home" operating systems, but on a "server" OS?  Who 
thought that was a good idea?

    -Dan Sikorski