Re: Hot to keep file copy from stopping?

From: cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user) (cquirkenews_at_nospam.mvps.org)
Date: 10/18/05 

Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 22:11:59 +0200

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 06:06:46 -0700, "John Schmidt"

>This has driven me crazy ever since the beginning of Windows Explorer.

Yep - me too.

>Why the heck do copy operations force you to cancel when finding even one
>"access denied" file??? How can you get Windows to skip that one and
>continue copying the rest???

No-one at MS thought of that, just as no-one thought beyond successive
ad-hoc "x is read-only", "y is a program" nags.

There's no best-choice auto-behavior here, so what you want is a
dialog that lets you set anticipatory behaviors for the operation you
are doing. Saving these as "always use..." would be dangerous tho.

For example, the file operations dialog could have a "Behavior..."
button next to the usual "Cancel". When clicked, a dialog pops up in
which you can preset whether to abort on errors, and what to do when
various situations are encountered that current prompt nags. If you
populate this dialog, then a summary of what happened appears when the
operation is completed.

>I need to move about 50 gigs of files to a new drive, and every now and then
>it comes across one of these, forcing me to track it down, then start the
>operation all over again, since you have no idea where the copy operation
>left off. This is ridiculous!!!! There were only 16 minutes to go out of
>over 4 hours, and this is the 3rd time I've had to start over!!

Yup. My SOP there is to:
  - note which "folder" (or file) was being copied
  - deselect all completed items as well as the "problem" one
  - repeat the remainder of the copy operation
  - drill into the failed folder and repeat within there
  - when done, highlight all, Properties, in both windows
  - if folder, file and byte counts not the same, chase up

How to chase up; select matching blocks of content in source and
destination panes, and do the Properties thing, compare. If same,
move on to next block, else highlight half of what you selected
previously and repeat. If same, check other half; else check half of
the half you had selected etc. until you drill down to the bad file.

It's annoying that the file operations dialog shows only the last
folder name in the file spec, instead of the full path. It's also
annoying that MS's in-house testing seems to be done with trivial file
loads that hardly push the scalability envelope.

Honestlty, I've have folks tell me with a straight face that "copying
thousands of files is an unusual 'geek' activity for which you need
special tools; Windows is for 'normal' people". Pathetic.

See http://cquirke.blogspot.com/ right back to 23 March 2005.

>How can I keep these few files from aborting file copy operations???

Skip them and come back to them later. Usually you will find they are
corrupted at the disk or file system level, and that's why they can't
copy - insane start cluster or size, invalid characters in name, etc.

>I can't believe that Explorer thinks because you find even one file
>like this, it cancels the whole operation.

Think about it - there are contexts when that is exactly what you'd
want. That's why one needs more options and UI control.

>There must be a way around this.

FoxIt (or is that RoadKill?) has a tool called "unstoppable copy", but
I haven't logged enough mileage to trust it as yet.

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   I'm baaaack!
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