Microsoft Richcopy

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Windows 7 IT Pro > Windows 7 Performance

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One of the Microsoft tools that was being used by Microsoft programmers to copy or move files in faster speed. This tool was developed in 1996 but it was being used internally by Microsoft and was not made available for public usages. However, at a later stage they made it available for free public download and now you can also experience faster file copying and moving with this small Windows utility, called RichCopy. RichCopy can copy multiple files.

at a time with up to 8 times faster speed than the normal file copy and moving process. Surprisingly it copies and moves files even faster than RoboCopy tool and XCOPY command. Since the tool was being used by the developers, they made it pretty effective and stable .

download Microsoft Rich copy 4.0

Key Features of RichCopy

1. More powerful, faster and stable than than any other file copying tool. 2. Create several profiles to assign special settings with a specific profile. 3. Copy files from multiple and different locations and save in a single destination. 4. Filter the files based on the date, time and choose to either copy or opt those files. 5. Being on GUI, supports command lines. 6. Suspend and resume file copy at any time.

Reference : Technet Magazine

Hope it Helps

Nikhil

o Edited by Nikhil Deshpande Monday, December 07, 2009 3:17 AM changed to Noel's Link o Edited by Ronnie VernonMVP, Moderator Tuesday, March 16, 2010 9:48 PM edit

Sunday, December 06, 2009 4:26 AM

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Sounds Good-:)

Sunday, December 06, 2009 12:14 PM

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Yeah Nice Share

we can move with more files ah!

Sunday, December 06, 2009 12:22 PM

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Great find, Nikhil! Thank you.

By the way, I couldn't access the link you posted. Here's another:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/d/0/fd05def7-68a1-4f71-8546- 25c359cc0842//HoffmanUtilitySpotlight2009_04.exe

-Noel

Monday, December 07, 2009 1:55 AM

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HI Noel

Thanks for the link its working fine yesterday, i will change the link and replaces that you have posted. thanks for your wishes.

Nikhil

Monday, December 07, 2009 3:15 AM Reply

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I've been using RichCopy 4.0.217 for some time now and it works great...when it works. Since it's free, there's no support available. My problem is that it will occasionally neglect to copy a bunch of files, giving an error, "The system cannot find the path specified." Perhaps it can't create a folder in the destination, despite having sufficient permissions.

Can I buy another clue? Any other users out there?

Monday, January 11, 2010 10:49 PM

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Sign in to vote I've been trying to use it to quickly backup some files to take off our server. a) I've had the same "The system cannot find the path specified." message many, many times. This leads me to question if it gets everything, and it doesn't really save time if you need to run it twice! I've tried decreasing or increasing threads to no avail. b) Not once has the program actually completed, crashing out at some random time in the process. The error (posted below) looks liek a GUI issue, and not actually to do with copying the files at all! Not being supported, of course there nowhere to check for assistance or clues.

I'm not suprised they kept this as an Internal app - I'll stay with Robocopy for now.

*******************

Faulting application name: RichCopy.exe, version: 4.0.217.0, time stamp: 0x4a2fa7bf

Faulting module name: comctl32.dll, version: 6.10.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bd976

Exception code: 0xc0000409

Fault offset: 0x0009a4ef

Faulting process id: 0x26c8

Faulting application start time: 0x01ca98c61402b389

Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Rich Tools\RichCopy 4.0\RichCopy.exe

Faulting module path: C:\Windows\WinSxS\x86_microsoft.windows.common- controls_6595b64144ccf1df_6.0.7600.16385_none_421189da2b7fabfc\comctl32.dll

Wednesday, January 20, 2010 2:59 AM

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I have the same problem with RichCopy 4.0.217.0 crashing out randomly. I would use RoboCopy instead, but my workplace is still stuck on Windows XP SP3 until Windows 7 SP1 is released. The Windows XP version of RoboCopy has its own share of bugs.

Monday, February 01, 2010 5:53 PM

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I just tried out RichCopy and it's a great tool... but I found that everytime it hits a file or folder with an & symbol in it fails to copy. Instead it reports, "The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect."

So it's almost perfect... but it can't copy "Marley & Me.mpg" or copy any files out of a folder called "This & That".

Tuesday, March 16, 2010 8:21 PM

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i know the feeling. i've tried robocopy, xcopy, richcopy (seems buggy and unreliable when choosing single extensions to include), however there is XXCopy from pixelabs. No, it's not free but it does work very well.

Last week, i began switching all of my scripting over from a combination of xcopy + xxcopy over to robocopy since our MS licensing allows us to use it at no cost, has built-in switches for easily logging the copy process, PLUS it had the copy status % and ETA options. Once I got to one of the last scripts, I figured out that robocopy cannot search multiple files on disk and place them into a single folder (aka concatenate). An example is to search for all .PST files and place them into a single folder such as "%userprofile%\my documents\archives". XXCopy has this feature (use the /SG switch) and it works very well. Plus, if a duplicate name is encountered during the copying process, it simply takes (file #1 - archive.pst) and makes it archive0001.pst. Otherwise, all filenames are exactly what they were before.

I originally just used xcopy until about 2 years ago when the requrement came up to consolidate all of the PST files into one folder. XXCopy did this one task perfectly every time and i never bothered replacing xcopy since it was already working fine.

Unless something changes in the next week or two, I guess i will move everything to XXCopy and upgrade our license count.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 11:52 AM

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I have had the same issue with RichCopy crashing. When running it on a Win2k3 std x86 server the application just closes, on Win2k8 r2 std x64, it will actually give me an error message. Here is the application error:

Faulting application name: RichCopy64.exe, version: 4.0.217.0, time stamp: 0x4a2fa7b5 Faulting module name: RichCopy64.exe, version: 4.0.217.0, time stamp: 0x4a2fa7b5 Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x000000000006b4d3 Faulting process id: 0x1d70 Faulting application start time: 0x01cadcde196c0a39 Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Rich Tools\RichCopy 4.0\RichCopy64.exe Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Rich Tools\RichCopy 4.0\RichCopy64.exe Report Id: 566020c7-4945-11df-889d-0024e877b0fe

The screenshot i have displays 3 of the files being copied, two of them are from a folder with an '&' symbol. I am rather surprised this is the culprit, but it appears to be so. Looks like I am headed back to RoboCopy :/

Friday, April 16, 2010 3:17 PM

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The amperand (&) symbol means something special in DOS command line lingo, and is uncommon in file/folder names, so it's not tremendously surprising some tools might have a problem with it. They're not handling it properly.

Something to try would be to put the path in quotes, if possible.

If that doesn't work, maybe the best thing to do would be to rename that folder, if possible.

-Noel

Friday, April 16, 2010 4:04 PM

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I just did some more testing and I don't think the ampersand is the problem, i think its the path length. The path it is choking on is over 255 characters (including spaces). I am going to retry my copy, mapping the drive to a letter which should save ~30 char. Any other work around for long path names? If this continues to be a problem is there an easy way to get a listing of all of the paths over 255 chars?

Thanks!

Tuesday, April 20, 2010 9:06 PM

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"%" in file name also causes problem.

Monday, July 26, 2010 8:44 PM

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I've just run into that long pathname problem. In Windows 7 when it starts to read Users\All Users\Application Data, it gets into some kind of recursive loop, e.g. \Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data ... until the pathname length exceeds 255 chars. Then it bombs and I get the Windows 7 prompt to let Microsoft look online for solutions.

I tried to filter "Application Data" as the name of a folder but that didn't work for some reason. Richcopy kept right on recursing the "Application Data" folder until it crashed. So I rechecked the exclusion filter in my profile and found that the option had been unchecked. The name "Application Data" was still there but it was greyed out. I checked the option again, clicked on "Apply" and exited the options menu. Then I opened the options menu again and saw the the option was once again unchecked. For some reason Richcopy would not save the state of that option.

Aside from that strange recursion problem with "Application Data", I have other pathnames that exceed 255 chars. I'd like to be able to copy those. In any case, attempts to filter those didn't work either. Looks like it's back to the drawing board with Synctoy, Robocopy, Xcopy, etc. I saw a few references to XXcopy in this thread; I think I'll take a look at that.

Richcopy version: 4.0.217.0

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium

Have a good one,

Big Al Mintaka

Thursday, July 29, 2010 11:57 AM

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Hello,

I too have been experiencing similiar issues of random crashes with RichCopy 4.0. I have been using RichCopy 3.5 (underground hack from MS) for years. It performed faster and it did not have as many bug issues as 4.0. If you like RichCopy, I would suggest searching for the 3.5 version.

I am kind of in the boat of searching for another product tool. I recently completed a massive File Server migration and a bunch of files came over corrupted. I suspect RichCopy 4.0 had something to do with this.

I found this link recently which helped in clearing up some questions about RichCopy 4.0.

http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/readyhow-replicate-file-shares-using- microsoft-richcopy

Jason

Tuesday, October 19, 2010 2:22 PM

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For anyone who's experienced these errors:

Try increasing the buffer size in the settings for folder and file copy. After doing this, I no longer experienced the 0xc0000005 exception errors and RichCopy is able to complete.

I too experienced the frustrating RichCopy crashes when trying to copy a very large file system from a Novell to a Windows server. The folder contained over 2.5 million files and was 1.7 terabytes large. With the default settings RichCopy would crash about 1/3 of the way through the folder structure.

After increasing the buffers, I was able to run the copy to completion with 10 threads for folder search, copy and file copy.

There was *one* other change I made, and that was to run the application under 2008 SP1 (ie, no R2) compatibility mode. But I believe the buffer change is what made the difference. If you find the program still crashes after increasing buffer size, try running it in compatibility mode.

I'm using it on a 2008 R2 SP1 server to copy several multi-terabyte folders with several million files in each. No more errors. :)

Cheers,

Brent

Sunday, June 19, 2011 2:33 PM

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Good suggestion here. Can you check some random Word and Excel files to see if they were corrupted during the copy process? That has been my biggest issue with RichCopy v4.0 now and the primary reason for reverting back to Robocopy.

Jason

Wednesday, June 22, 2011 2:43 PM

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Hi Jason -

No, I have not experienced any file corruption issues (at least that I can tell). I've used RichCopy recently with the settings I described to migrate a large department's data from an old Novell server to Windows. The migrated folders are pretty heavily used by several hundred users, and I have not had any reports of corrupted files.

I've continued to run the program with 2008 (non R2) compatibility mode, because things are working and I need to get more data migrated off old servers. Later I may try running RichCopy without compatibility mode to determine for sure whether it was just the buffers tweaking in the settings that did the trick.

Cheers, Brent

Thursday, June 23, 2011 7:54 PM

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Yikes!

Reading this post makes me wonder if i did the right thing by using RichCopy to merge a restore tree with a live tree for a 100,000 user maildir restore!

So far 3,000,000 files in and it looks like its going ok but the logfile is at 800Mb and I can't load it on the server yet.

I have 2 problems: A) it started great, stabilising at 8Mb /sec but now after 18Hrs of processing its dropped to 2.2mb / sec. B) it is using an excessive amount of ram now upto 2.6mb and pushing the system ram to 15.6Gb out of 16Gb ram!

i can't see any reason why the speed should drop so dramatically. does this mean its all going to explode beneath my feet before it completes? And Why should it consume memory unless there is a memory leak?

Andy T

Tuesday, July 26, 2011 8:43 AM Reply

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OK...

If anyone is interested, I found out why RichCopy was holding 2.6GB private memory in Task Manager!! (Yes 2.6GB - not 2.6mb as I said before)

Basically it seems that Richcopy does not dispose of ram very efficiently and leaves a lot of pages in standby cache. You can see a lot of good information about your free / used ram by using sysinternals RamMap Here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/ff700229

By clearing the Standby List, page list and working sets, this will free up most of your ram giving you peace of mind that your server isn't going to explode in front of you.

Ram is now sitting at 6 Gb of 16Gb whereas before it was 15.6Gb / 16Gb

Andy T

Tuesday, July 26, 2011 9:48 AM

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I have experienced the same problem as Big Al. I set all inclusion/exclusion information and apply. When I hit "OK" and then review, all checked items are no longer checked. The information and paths are still there but they are no longer activated.

Any thoughts? Anyone?

Thursday, September 22, 2011 11:36 AM

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My thoughts, It is 1/2 baked like everything Microsoft. What I cannot deal with is , a file will skip "Path Not Found", and it is because the path is too long. (Microsoft will let you create files paths > 255 charaters, but it will not let you copy those files, because the core operating system is dumb. It can't even copy files that it creates. Richcopy is dumb, because it gives no log or reason why the file was skipped. It just says" Oh well, some of your stuff didn't copy over, I don't know what it was, and I can't tell you why, but ur missing some of your stuff. Have a nice day". I am off to find another file copy utility that hopefully can tell me what it can't copy Saturday, October 22, 2011 1:51 PM

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I found a partial replacement for RichCopy. It's called FastCopy and was featured on Helge Klein's (maker of SetACL) blog back in May 2011.

Saturday, October 22, 2011 5:44 PM

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I found a partial replacement for RichCopy. It's called FastCopy and was featured on Helge Klein's (maker of SetACL) blog back in May 2011.

Most awsome program. Doesn't give a rat's whisker about file paths greater that 260! Doesn't use Windows OS at all, you can throttle the speed and get some real throughput with this program, plus A LOG IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011 8:45 PM

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does anyone know if you can consolidate folders? For example, I have a SD card from my camera. I put it in the card reader. I have a script that will first ask for the name of the new folder you would like the script to create, then, it will take pictures from multiple folders on the card and dump them into that newly created folder without the card's folder structure. It just places all pics into the root of that new folder, regardless of where they came from.

Doable?

thanks in advance,

joe

Thursday, December 01, 2011 2:16 AM

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For anyone who's experienced these errors:

Try increasing the buffer size in the settings for folder and file copy. After doing this, I no longer experienced the 0xc0000005 exception errors and RichCopy is able to complete.

After increasing the buffers, I was able to run the copy to completion with 10 threads for folder search, copy and file copy.

I'm using it on a 2008 R2 SP1 server to copy several multi-terabyte folders with several million files in each. No more errors. :)

Cheers,

Brent

Brent,

How do I increase the buffer size in RichCopy 4.0? I am unable to locate this setting. Thanks

Jason

Friday, January 13, 2012 3:18 PM

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Make sure you selected Advanced under the view tab. That should give you more functions under the options.

Thursday, January 19, 2012 7:48 PM

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Thanks for the reply. I have enabled the Advanced feature but I still don't see anything that says "Buffer" size. Is the setting labeled as something else?

Jason

Friday, January 20, 2012 2:10 PM

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Hi,

Have problems to use the "Copy if timestamp is updated" It still copies all files in the folder, and not only the new files that is the intention.

Mikael

Wednesday, May 09, 2012 3:06 PM

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OK...

If anyone is interested, I found out why RichCopy was holding 2.6GB private memory in Task Manager!! (Yes 2.6GB - not 2.6mb as I said before)

By clearing the Standby List, page list and working sets, this will free up most of your ram giving you peace of mind that your server isn't going to explode in front of you.

Ram is now sitting at 6 Gb of 16Gb whereas before it was 15.6Gb / 16Gb

Andy T

Came here with the same results. My problem is now I have 80 servers that need the mapped files cleared. Does anyone have a command line utility to clear the mapped file table?

Friday, January 04, 2013 2:04 AM

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Would anyone be able to let me know if I am missing a setting? Trying to copy some large files over a network... and when the connection drops.. I loose the existing data, and has to start from scratch again. In a nutshell, I can pause and resume while things are fine, but the moment I really lose the connections.. Back to square one...

Just not sure if RichCopy leaves ... partials.

Running Default options. (Only with some mild exclusions of certain types of files)

Thank you

o Edited by Matt Levine Tuesday, April 30, 2013 9:19 PM

Tuesday, April 30, 2013 6:00 PM

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pero tengo un inconveniente, quiero copiar archivos de nombres muy largos (mas de 260 caracteres), dentro de directorios también con nombres largos.

Pueden recomendar algun programa para hacer este trabajo

Gracias

Neil

Wednesday, June 12, 2013 6:39 PM

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Another software that I am sharing might also help you with some errors .Try and download " Long Path Tool " is also useful in situations where you see these error messages: Cannot read from source file or disk, there has been a sharing violation, cannot delete file or folder, the file name you specified is not valid or too long, the source or destination file may be in use and many other file managing errors.

Sunday, September 01, 2013 3:35 PM

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Great utility, amazing speeds but one small issue preventing me from using...

Is it possible to prevent RichCopy from overwriting a file in the destination if the date/time is newer than the source. I see hundreds of possible exceptions/error handling. But that one seems to be missing.

Thanks

Friday, October 04, 2013 3:22 PM

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Is there a way to use RichCopy to copy files between RDP mounted local drive (on the RDP client PC) and drives on the remote PC (the RDP server)? Somehow RichCopy (installed using default options) does not see the RDP mounted drive (for example C on clientpc).

Thanks!

Thursday, February 27, 2014 6:33 PM

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Hello, this is a great app. Would it also be possible to add copying To multiple server locations?

Tuesday, July 08, 2014 4:54 PM

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This was my problem as well. I had 8 GB RAM on my server, RichCopy consumed ALL of it and started to skip files (I am guessing this was the reason). I upgraded to 16 GB RAM, again same issue! Task Manager shows only about 1 GB consumed by all process and less than 10 MB by RichCopy!

I downloaded RAMMap and only "Empty Working Sets". Worked like a charm. I recovered 11 GB RAM within seconds.

THANKS SO MUCH FOR SHARING!!! Monday, July 14, 2014 6:09 PM

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I am getting the below error. You'll have to piece the URL back together...

I have went to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\COMPONENTS and removed PendingXmlIdentifier . NextQueueEntryIndex, AdvancedInstallersNeedResolving were not present.

http:// s27.postimg . org/3xqrqfbvn/2014_09_03_02_20_09_Microsoft_Rich_Copy_4_0.png

Wednesday, September 03, 2014 6:26 AM

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I've seen issues with Application Data repeating over and over, and it is not a Richcopy problem. I believe it has to do with junctions or symlinks. Windows uses symlinks for most of the special directories - documents, music, etc. If you have upgraded from other windows versions or done something else that recreates these directories, you end up getting multiple copies of the directories and symlinks.

Typically, only one of the copies for each is valid and the other points to some invalid location.

Essentially, if you have a never ending Application Data path, it is symlink related. I was able to fix my issue with Application Data forever recursing, but it was not easy and required changing settings all over the place as many settings were pointing to them.

Thursday, November 06, 2014 8:39 PM

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Does anyone know WHY Rich copy won't keep the permissions of the original owner of the file? When I do a copy which by the way works perfectly, when I drill down to see the owner of the file on the copy it changes it to the administrator. I need the owner of the file to remain. Does anyone know if secure copy does this?

Wednesday, December 17, 2014 3:29 PM

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Any of you having trouble with this may want to try "teracopy" http://codesector.com/teracopy or http://download.cnet.com/TeraCopy/3000- 2248_4-10671835.html as it handles as many files as you wish, and buffers them for increased speed.

Saturday, February 14, 2015 3:51 AM

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