Copy large # of files from one directory

[DeanB]

I have 100,000 small image files in a directory. I press Select All
and it takes minutes (if not hours) to respond, and to copy them just
generally fails. Not sure why - I'm assuming its a memory issue in
loading up file information (header info), but I don't really know.
Makes it a PITA to move files around - I had to write a little program
that moves files one at a time, rather than doing the windows select
all.

Any advice welcomed.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I have 100,000 small image files in a directory. I press Select All
and it takes minutes (if not hours) to respond, and to copy them just
generally fails. Not sure why - I'm assuming its a memory issue in
loading up file information (header info), but I don't really know.
Makes it a PITA to move files around - I had to write a little program
that moves files one at a time, rather than doing the windows select
all.

Any advice welcomed.

Robocopy.exe is the recommended tool for such large volumes.
You can download it from the Microsoft site.

 

[Homer J. Simpson]

Personally I'd just drop to a command prompt and do the copy from there.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Personally I'd just drop to a command prompt and do the copy from there.

This works in theory but in practice it may fail because
of a known bug with xcopy.exe when copying large
numbers of files.

 

[Patrick Keenan]

I have 100,000 small image files in a directory. I press Select All
and it takes minutes (if not hours) to respond, and to copy them just
generally fails. Not sure why - I'm assuming its a memory issue in
loading up file information (header info), but I don't really know.
Makes it a PITA to move files around - I had to write a little program
that moves files one at a time, rather than doing the windows select
all.

Any advice welcomed.

In addition to robocopy, you might look at FileSync. www.fileware.com

HTH
-pk

 

[Homer J. Simpson]

Personally I'd just drop to a command prompt and do the copy from there.

This works in theory but in practice it may fail because
of a known bug with xcopy.exe when copying large
numbers of files.

How "large" is large? I used to use xcopy to do just that on a regular
basis, with a set of ~150,000 files. The number of files in the target
folder always ended up matching the number of files in the source.

Was this some older version of xcopy? Any idea if this has been fixed in
more recent Windows versions?

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

How "large" is large? I used to use xcopy to do just that on a regular
basis, with a set of ~150,000 files. The number of files in the target
folder always ended up matching the number of files in the source.

Was this some older version of xcopy? Any idea if this has been fixed in
more recent Windows versions?

I don't know what the limit is - perhaps > 1000 files?. I have observed
the phenomenon on several occasions on different machines, both on
Win2000 and WinXP. It is also reported regularly in newsgroups.

 

[Homer J. Simpson]

I don't know what the limit is - perhaps > 1000 files?. I have observed

the phenomenon on several occasions on different machines, both on
Win2000 and WinXP. It is also reported regularly in newsgroups.

1000 is pretty low. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I don't recall
seeing any evidence this ever has caused me any problem...since my DOS 2.0
days.