Extremely fast Windows file copy/move for large directory trees?

Question

I have a disk of several tB and once a month I back it up to an external drive. I have just done this by copying source -> backup with Total Commander and choosing "overwrite all older".

Over time, I have deleted/renamed/restructured directories and directory trees, which causes me to have two copies of some on the backup.

What is the quickest way to have the backup mirror the original, including renaming & deletion?

Note that I can guarantee that no files on the source are in use (by me) during the operation.

I am looking for something gratis with the speed of something like TeraCopy, which mirrors directory trees.

Answer 1

You could use robocopy from the command prompt. You could also put it in a batch file if the source and destination disks do not change their drive letters over time.

And since you’re using Windows 10, robocopy is already installed with it. (It can be downloaded for some older versions of Windows, but you shouldn’t need to do that with Windows 10).

To achieve mirroring of drive X to a folder named “bak” on drive Y, use the “/mir” option as follows:

robocopy /mir x:\. y:\bak

This will cause displaying all the folder names, in addition to all modified filenames. This displaying on the console window could slow things when you have many files and folders, so use the “/log” option to send the output to a file instead. This and other tips on speeding it up can be found here.