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RichCopy bulk file copy tool released – get it here

  • Article

People have been asking me for years in my presentations what that icon on my desktop called “RichCopy” was.  I would of course tell them all about it.  That was always followed by a request for the utility.  Well, it only took nine years to fulfill that request, but it’s finally here.

I didn’t even know we were going to release it, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it prominently displayed right at the top of the April TechNet Magazine.  The cover pic on the website is too small for you to see the box next to the TechNet name, but fear not.  Head on over to the column from Joshua Hoffman called, “Utility Spotlight: RichCopy”

Joshua gives you some of the background, history, and other information in the column.  But you’ll want to head right to the download link and grab one of my favorite utilities. Here’s a screenshot of this bad boy in action.  In the job below, I am uploading the content for the Interop Road Show to a server in Seattle.  RichCopy has ten upload threads going and as you can see, I am uploading the very beginning of the self extracting archive.

RichCopy

This brings me to an important point.  If you are supplying people a big fat .ISO image or zip file, please rethink your strategy.  WinRAR from RARLabs is a great archive utility and when combined with a tool like RichCopy, it’s a match made in heaven.  With WinRAR, I took the entire set of content and archived it into 100MB chunks.  People that use multi threaded download tools like RichCopy are going to love me for that. 

My team standard for FTP is the wonderful FileZilla.  Like RichCopy, FileZilla is also multi threaded.  I have never used RichCopy for FTP because until the public release, you were required to be connected to our corporate AD forest to use it.  And the last thing I want is a FTP client that is running across the VPN connection.  That has all changed now, so I need to run some tests with both of them and see if there’s a clear winner.  Today I am using RichCopy for SMB and FileZilla for FTP.  Using a single util for both may make more sense now.

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

[UPDATE for 5/1] Ken Tamaru was/is doing development and maintenance of RichCopy.  He recently started a blog at https://blogs.technet.com/ken/.  There is the place to ask RichCopy questions.  Keep in mind however he has a day job and it’s completely different than being a developer for the RichCopy utility.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2009
    Ummm Kieth - it's still got the label on the help screen  "This is Microsoft Internal Tool. It is not allowed to use this tool outside of Microsoft Corporate network without following appropriate process." Now  - as far as I'm concerned, my "appropriate process" is to just click on your link ... your mileage may vary ;-) dave

  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2009
    Yea, I noticed that too.  I also noticed some bugs in the help system.  The EULA and Help need to be fixed in my opinion.  

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2009
    Hi, my name as you know is Jaderson Silva. From Brazil... Sorry about my silly question, but is it possible you give some example where could you use this software and I could note it maybe be a fantastic one... I have read the "readme" but I have some using problems to use it. Maybe because I don´t need it yet and have no idea where use and how to use it! e-mail: jaderson.impacta@hotmail.com or silvajd83@uol.com.br Thank you so much!

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2009
    Jaderson, I use it primarily for downloading beta releases of our products from Seattle over a VPN connection.  Take a close look at all of the options.  There are many many ways to use the utility in a corporate setting, especially if copying files over long distances where a connection can get dropped.  RichCopy will retry the connection and continue.  That's a really handy feature to have while you sleep.

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2009
    I love this tool and am really pleased we've released it. I also discocered the very cool Free Download Manager recently, which allows you to grab stuff over http (as well as ftp, smb and a few other protocols) using multiple threads for each file and with resume etc. I found it via the instructions at Brian Keller's blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/briankel/archive/2007/09/06/a-more-reliable-and-faster-download-experience-for-rosario-vs08-vpc-s.aspx, in turn linked from the VS2010 CTP download athttp://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=922b4655-93d0-4476-bda4-94cf5f8d4814&displaylang=en

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2009
    As cool as Rich Copy is that is not the best article in the April issue, the article on Internet Explorer really caught my eye.  Thought you would like that too. :-)

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2009
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  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2009
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  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2009
    Yes! The directory exclude filter seems to be not running. Even the file exclusion list is ignored. The utility is great but, without file/dir exclusion properly working ... unusable.

  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2009
    Last time I used the filtering, I used it to include only certain files with a mask.  I have not had a chance to test all of the stuff in it, but I would hardly characterize it as unusable.  I use it weekly to push or pull bits.

  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2009
    RichCopy does almost everything. I have got it to exclude. Only thing it will not do is remove a directory. In my tests, I removed directories (and the files in the directories) from the source location.   Ran Richcopy, and then checked the destination. Richcopy removed the files in the directories but left the directories in the destination location.   Any idea's on how to remove directories?

  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2009
    I have been using JESCOPY so far, will try this one also. I believe that UI is far more compact and intuitive. RichCopy's interface reminds me of a download manager.

  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2009
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  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2009
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  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2009
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  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2009
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  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2009
    I will see if I can get the author of the utility to either respond to all of the questions, or start a blog and some level of support.

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2009
    Same problem with excludes. Tried to exclude by date. (I set it up to only copy prior to a specific date for files and folders) I keep losing the check marks and the dates keep resetting to the current date.

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2009
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  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2009
    I'm having the same issue with it not copying ACL's.  Guess it's back to robocopy for now.

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2009
    SCORE !!!! I think I have convinced Ken (the dev for RichCopy) to start a blog.  I am going to get it created and get things rolling.  When I have the blog created and have a link, I'll let you know. Stay tuned

  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2009
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  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2009
    Is there any way for it to preserve folder creation dates on copy?  

  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2009
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  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2009
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  • Anonymous
    April 17, 2009
    I'm also having the problem with exclusions not working properly.

  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2009
    I am also having issues with maintaining ACLs. Will be looking forward to the blog.

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2009
    I'm missing some Information on how does RichCopy addresses the behavior wich is addressed by Robocopy using the Opions /ZB ( copying files in Backup-Mode )

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2009
    I was about to give up on this and I got the ACL part working. The confuding part is to ignore the info on the overview screen as that is for compares. Within the "security information" section I selected all options except "System Access Control List" and it worked.

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2009
    Seconding Dan M's comments, I believe this falls under the whole exclusion problem when copying some, but not all subdirectories, and expecting the directory structure to also be copied to the destination folder. All in all, great app, I'd love to use it, but as is it's completely unusable.  My ideal app would be synctoy and its exclusion handling with the speed of richcopy

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2009
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