Copy Files quickly from a mapped network drive

Question

Hi,

Can anyone tell me how to quickly copy Files from a mapped network drive?

The windows Copy Paste works very slow and hampers the performance of the system.

I have used XCOPY source destination /i /s /z /q

This was quick enough and copied a few files and later threw an error "The specified network name not available"

I remember somebody using a workaround to copy files quickly from mapped networked drive.

Can any one suggest me a way to do this?

I use Windows XP, so please don't suggest me RoboCopy.

Answer 1

RoboCopy works fine on WinXP. The Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit that contains RoboCopy installs fine on XP.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en

Answer 2

There is no reliable, fast and simple way to copy files between Windows computers using only the tools that come with the OS.

Your options are:

• Unison
• RoboCopy (See this article with instructions on XP)
• rsync (comes with Cygwin)

Note that you can download the Windows 2003 server tools and unpack them on XP. It will work on XP.

Answer 3

I have found that Total Commander is significantly faster than any of the built-in copy mechanisms, including when copying files over the network.