How to really flood your network…

I’m doing a fair bit of server migration work at the moment. As part of that I often need to copy over large amounts of file based data.  To do that I’ve been using a tool called Robocopy which does a great job of it and allows me to script it to copy over a set of folders and then later run the script again to pickup any changed files.  Robocopy has been with us for years now as part of the Windows Server resource kits.

I’ve heard for some time about an internal tool that Microsoft uses called RichCopy.  I decided (with 400GB of data to copy) to give this tool a trial on this migration.  The tool is essential a GUI for Robocopy but is a whole lot more as well.  The key thing with this tool is the ability for it to copy multiple files at one time – great for large amounts of file based data such as what I’m faced with right now.  Below is a traffic graph of the tool which as you can see has filled my Ethernet connection between these two servers – that data will be across there in no time at all. 🙂

RichCopy has become my new tool of the week. You can get RichCopy from Microsoft here. You can also check out the author of Richcopys blog here