What am I doing wrong?

[mathewsdw]

I want to copy my entire C: drive to my T: drive (an external disk) for backup. I enter the following command:

[C:\]Copy /S /H /E /F /G /K /X C:\* T:\

and it sits there for a minute or two and then stops with nothing whatsoever copied (i.e. the T drive contains no files and no directories). Whatever can I be doing wrong?

 

[Charles Dye]

Have you tried it without the /E? Maybe there's an error message which you aren't seeing.

 

[Charles G]

[C:\] *copy /a: /f /g /k /l /s /x C:\* t:\

????

 

[mathewsdw]

The removal of "/E" was a very good idea but doing so changed nothing. And more: Executing:

[C:\]Timer on & *copy /S /H /F /G /K /X * T:\ & Timer Off
Timer 1 on: 22:18:58

[C:\]

The "Timer Off" was never executed and the "T" drive was empty.

Putting the copy into a batch file again preceded by a "Timer On" and followed by a "Timer Off" did nothing useful; again the "Timer Off" never got executed.

And entering the "Timer Off" command while the copy was actually executing gave the following:

[C:\]Timer on & *copy /S /H /F /G /K /X * T:\ & Timer Off
Timer 1 on: 22:18:58
[C:\]Timer off
Timer 1 off: 22:19:35  Elapsed: 0:00:37.30

That is approximately 37 seconds to do absolutely nothing.

And just to be complete about it although it shouldn't make any difference "T" is a subst'd drive to "X:\14-08-23" where "X" is the external hard drive.

 

[thedave]

I wonder if "robocopy /mir" might be a better choice? TCC's COPY really should work, and the fact that it abandons the entire command line without reporting an error clearly makes this a TCC bug (either in processing, or in the lack of a response).

In my experience, robocopy is dramatically faster at working through large trees and sets of data than TCC's COPY implementation, so even if you can figure out why your TCC command line won't work, robocopy might be a better solution overall.

 

[vefatica]

Did anyone other than Dan try this? Did it fail? I added "/N" so no copying would actually be done and got a quite long list of what would be done, and

105,467 files would be copied

 

[mathewsdw]

Thank you for telling me about RoboCopy (I'd never heard of it). It is a much better solution than is the Copy command as you pointed out (and why my straight copy failed so miserably will just remain a mystery).

 

[rconn]

That kind of COPY command is not a very good idea in Windows 7 or 8 -- Microsoft has some circular symbolic links on C:, so you'll just keep spinning round and round until you run out of stack space. Try it with the /NJ option.

 

[mathewsdw]

While that was something I didn't know (and further evidence that Microsoft isn't always very smart), Rex, that could not be the problem with my copy command. I will repeat: the command ran for 37 seconds and stopped after doing absolutely nothing.

 

[rconn]

While that was something I didn't know (and further evidence that Microsoft isn't always very smart), Rex, that could not be the problem with my copy command. I will repeat: the command ran for 37 seconds and stopped after doing absolutely nothing.

That's exactly what I would expect to happen if the copy started with one of the symlinks.

 

[mathewsdw]

Rex I have to disagree with you. I would think that that would cause an infinite loop rather than stopping after 37 seconds of doing absolutely nothing.

But we don't have to pursue this unless you want to (I'm willing to do whatever I can to help you figure out what the real problem is); the RoboCopy command does exactly what I want to get done.

 

[Charles Dye]

Rex I have to disagree with you. I would think that that would cause an infinite loop rather than stopping after 37 seconds of doing absolutely nothing.

Have you tried it with the /NJ option?

 

[mathewsdw]

Charles I have not but I will as soon as the RoboCopy terminates. That could take several days because it is a quite slow external IDE drive that I am copying to.