RoboCopy is a 32-bit Windows command-line application that simplifies the task of maintaining an identical copy of a folder tree in multiple locations, either on the same computer or in separate network locations. RoboCopy can provide time-efficient maintenance of mirror images of large folder trees on network servers separated by slow or unreliable wide area networks (WANs) links.
RoboCopy is robust: it retries after network errors. By copying only changed files, it saves a lot of time. RoboCopy is flexible: you can copy a single folder or walk a directory tree specifying multiple file names and wildcard characters for source files.
By default, RoboCopy ignores source file attributes when selecting files to copy. It copies any file matching specified conditions, regardless of the file's attribute settings.
To run RoboCopy, both the source and destination folders should reside on an NTFS partition wherever possible. You can use RoboCopy to copy to other file systems such as HPFS or FAT, but if you do so you might lose long file names, and file modification times might suffer from rounding errors at the destination.
RoboCopy outputs a log of files and folders to its command-prompt window, listing the folders processed, files copied and why, network errors, and incompatibilities between the source and destination folder-tree structures. This output can also be redirected to a disk file. Just before RoboCopy closes, it outputs a summary of its activities during its session to its command-prompt window, or to a disk file if redirected.
Although RoboCopy does not run as a service, you can use the Schedule service to run RoboCopy as a scheduled job. The scheduled job can run a command file that invokes RoboCopy and uses Soon.exe to reschedule the same command file in the future. This procedure has the same effect as a replication service, although in this case RoboCopy is restricted to using a single drive or share as both source and destination.
Note
Robocopy does not run on Microsoft® Windows® 95, or Microsoft® Windows NT® version 3.5x. RoboCopy is a Unicode application, and Windows 95 does not provide full Unicode support. Also, RoboCopy uses the CopyFileEx() Win32 API, which is supported on Microsoft® Windows® 2000 and Microsoft® Windows NT® version 4.0, but not on Windows NT 3.5x.
Files Required