When Jer's motherboard bit the dust he saw an opportunity to rebuild his PC, but what to do with the 140GB of data on his SATA drive while he reinstalled the OS?
I have plenty of storage space and after his help lifting and hauling to get the rack rebuilt it was the least I could do. I'm always amazed at the complexity of other peoples hard drives - I'm always aware of where everything is and what it does, but I'm not your regular user.
Having a hard drive with applications, documents and utilities installed with a methodololgy akin to decorating a cake with a shotgun is pretty much par for the general user.
With windows' tangle of cumbersome permissions, ownership and security copying the contents of a drive typically requires a utility. Now I wasn't interested in making an image of the disk and forcing Jer to access it with a utility. I just wanted to move the contents of the entire volume from A to B. I could just Ctrl-A the root of the disk - right click and strip off the permissions (probably 1-2 hours) then copy the data, hoping I hadn't missed some files embedded deep in the system like a tumor and tossing my copy out the window, forcing me to restart.
The copy function built into windows, even from the command prompt doesn't really allow for a clean restart if there's a failure (say a funky ownership setting in the system volume info folder). So you spend a lot of time doing the same thing over and over. What a pain!
So I tapped a smart guy I know, John and asked if he had a recommendation. Like myself he appreciates a well written utility with no frills and no bullshit - and he had just the ticket. During a recent server migration he'd used a tool called RoboCopy from the win2k3 server resource kit and recommended I take a look at it. I snagged a copy off the internet and started fiddling.
What an app! Not that Robocopy has a broad application but what it does it does very, very well. It's like someone at microsoft dug up some crusty old dos coder and said "Hey, we need a new version of copy, kind of like XCopy - but better..." Then left him alone for a few weeks. No frills, no bullshit, just a lean mean utility with no market speak or fluff features.
So, proof that there are still people at microsoft writing good code. Thanks guys! Robocopy is a straight forward command line utility. It allows direct control and provides a certain amount of intelligence. It's kind of like XCOPY's mean big brother.
