Data Copy Software

[CaptNKILL]

Ok, this might seem a little strange at first but Im looking for software to copy large amounts of data (ie, entire hard drives) to folders on other drives. Windows does it, but its a huge pain in the ass because there are a lot of things that cant be copied and when Windows comes across one, it simply gives an error and stops without even telling where the file was. Because of this, doing data backups for customers here at the shop I work at can take hours upon hours when it should just be a simple copy\paste deal.

You know, it just occurred to me that I could probably use the command prompt (id have to look into what switches to use to ignore errors though) but I'd still prefer a windows program that can do it.

Anyone know of anything like this? Basically, it just needs to be able to copy huge amounts of files from drive to drive and ignore errors (or record them without stopping the copy process).

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Oh man...I can think of about a billion easy ways to do this with just bash and a few basic unix coreutils; very standard with any linux distribution.

If it must be under windows, I suppose cygwin could provide that unix functionality, but IMO cygwin is a bit laggy.

cp...tar...both have some "archive" modes that are second to none and will backup everything exactly as it was found - trees, attributes, and all.

dd is about the simplest yet most powerful tool available for creating/copying/manipulating disk images ever.

I suppose an alternate "completely windows" approach would be to use winrar to create an archive (either zip or rar; doesn't matter) with no compression at all, which would be just as fast as a direct copy (in fact it would still save space anyways since there'd be no filesystem slack as it would be all one file) and it'll probably get every single file, as well as restore every single file just fine when you want to restore the backup.

[rewt]

Look into Paragon Software Group (http://www.paragon.ag/).

Something else I just found, and came in very useful;

Effective File Search (http://www.sowsoft.com/search.htm)