I love me some rsync, toss in some ssh and there’s nothing I can’t do.

So imagine my frustration when I had to use my Windows 7 laptop to download a bunch of large files from a slow network share, across a VPN tunnel. After about the 4th try I was ready to snap.

This lead to tons of searches for “network share download managers” and “resume download network share”. Finally I stumbled across an application, already built into Windows 7 (might be in other versions, I have no idea, I’m not a Windows guy)…Robocopy!

Robocopy can resume, mirror directories and do alot of other pretty cool stuff. There are many sites dedicated to it so you can find all the documentation you want on Google. I just have a few snippets here to show my usage.

This command (modified to be easy to understand) allows the download/sync to be resumed (thanks to /Z)
robocopy \Server1folder1folder2 d:myfolder1 /Z

It would also work copying from my PC to the share:
robocopy d:myfolder1 \Server1folder1folder2  /Z

You could even do this is you wanted to mirror (danger can delete files on either side if the folder contents do not match):
robocopy \Server1folder1folder2 d:myfolder1 /Z /MIR

Again, I’m not a Windows guy, but you know sometimes you have no choice, so it pays to have a few tricks up your sleeve.

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Filed under: MS Windows,Tips & Tricks - @ August 22, 2011 4:45 pm

Tags: download, network share, resume, robocopy