Kurt Shintaku's Blog

If you’ve been in IT for any period of time, you know about Robocopy.  It’s a really cool tool that provides a lot of power for file copying in a little package.  Basically, it’s one of the IT guys’ best friends.  (For those uninitiated, go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=72969 to download it – it’s part of the Windows Server Resource Kit.)

(As a quick aside, most people don’t know that Robocopy actually stands for Robust Copy, and not the police officer of robotic fame.)

The thing is, it’s never had a GUI.  Most tools that provide mass-copy services like the infamous RichCopy (a Microsoft internal tool that leaked out, and since thennew versions have been under lock and key requiring Microsoft corporate network access to actually function – dictatorial ‘eh?) have always had friendly GUIs that allow people to quickly get started copying a large quantity of file data.

Because let’s face it:  Most file copy jobs are simple.  They’re not conditional, they’re not fancy!

1. You just want to copy a a whole @#$% load of files from one network server to your local machine… or somewhere else and you want retries or you want the copy process to be network fault tolerant in the event the TCP pipe gets cut off across the WAN or something.
2. Or maybe you want to copy one big #$%^ file, like an .ISO image of a CDROM that’s 600MB or a VirtualPC .VHD file that’s 2.6GB in size and you don’t want to have to "start all over again" if the transfer fails 70% of the way through the copy.

Robocopy does all of this for you – so why not have a a good ol’ GUI?  Enter RobocopyGUI.  RobocopyGUI give you an easy to understand GUI interface for Robocopy but even more importantly, it generates script that you can save after using the tool so that you can then repurpose the Robocopy instructions you configured in the RobocopyGUI tool for your scripts.  Additionally, you can save all your settings so that you don’t have to "restart from scratch" every time you run the tool and set up settings.

DOWNLOAD:  Robocopy GUI (Utility Spotlight 11/2006)

(Thanks to Derk Benisch from the MSN Group for developing this tool, and thanks Joshua Hoffman for bringing this tool to light in the November issue of Technet Magazine.  Great article!)