Slow Copying in Windows 11? Try FastCopy to copy your files.

if you need to copy a lot of data from one pc to another perhaps for a computer migration or even just to back up your own personal data this free file copy utility could be just what you need today's video is about fast copy a free file copy utility that i always use if i need to copy a lot of data from one pc to another or if i just want to backup some files to a usb drive normally the go to utility for copying a lot of data is robocopy which is a microsoft tool and it comes built into windows robot copy is great for copying data but it can be a little bit complicated as it only works from the command line fast copy has similar features to robocopy but it comes with a graphical user interface which makes it easy to use but as an added bonus you can also run it from the command line as well which means you get the best of both worlds other benefits of using fast copy are that it's often much faster than both robocopy and the windows file copy utility and it's not restricted to the 260 character file path limit that the windows file copy is so in this demo i'll show you how to install and use fast copy and i'll also do a file copy test and compare it against windows file explorer and robocopy so to get fast copy installed we just need to open up a web browser and search for download fast copy now we're looking for the url that just says fastcopy.jp click on that to take us to the site and that will give us two install links we can just go ahead and click on the first one and the file should automatically download to your download folder and then double click on the installer to install the application now i'm just going to modify the default file path for the install because it's going to put it in my user profile folder i'm just going to change that to put it on the c drive so that means it will be available for any user that logs into this pc and then click on start to start the install it should only take a few seconds and that is fast copy now installed firstly i recommend changing this one setting so that we can integrate fast copy into the window shell and that means that when you right click on a file or a folder we'll get an extra fast copy option in the right click menu so to do that we just click on option click on main settings go down to shell extension and then just put a tick in the enable box and then okay so now if you right click on a file or a folder we then get these extra fast copy options in the menu if you want to check out everything that fastcopy can do then it comes with a really good manual which you can get to by clicking on help and help again and that gives you a really detailed description of all the different options and features that you can use with fastcopy and you can just click on any of the hyperlinks to take you directly to that part of the manual okay so there's three different ways you can copy data with fast copy the first way is to simply click on the source and destination boxes and choose the data to be copied and the destination where to copy the data to you can also use file explorer to drag and drop your source and destination paths onto the fast copy window so i'm copying the folder from my c drive onto an s drive which is just a shared folder on a file server we've got some additional options we can choose we can tell fastcopy to verify the data after it's been copied and we can also tell fastcopy to give us an estimate of how long it will take to copy the data if you're copying data between file servers you can tick on the acl option and that will copy the access control list so if your data has ncfs permissions on the files fast copy it will also copy those permissions across and once you're happy with all the options click on the execute button to start with a fast copy and get some information in the main window to tell us how much data has been copied so far and the time remaining to complete the copy you can minimize the main window during the copy process and it will continue to copy in the background and you can see a little fast copy icon in the system tray we can just double click on that and that will open the main window again and that's my copy completed if i wanted to check the details of any data copies that i've completed in the past then we can click on file and open last file log will open the details of the last copy that i've just done and that will give you all the details of the data that's been copied whether there was any errors and it skipped any files and how long it took to copy the data it also keeps a master log of every copy that's ever been done so if you click on file and open log that will include information about all the copies that you've done previously you can also get to the log file at any time by manually browsing to the fast copy folder and to open the master file log it's just the fast copy text file and that lists all of the copies that have been done to date or if you manually browse to the log folder that will show you each individual copy that's been done so so far it's just showing that one copy that i've just done second way to copy data with fast copy is to drag and drop thousand folders between two windows and this is my preferred method just because it's so simple so i like to have two file explorer windows open and i have one looking at the source data and the second one looking at the target location destination and then you can simply choose the data and drag and drop between the two windows once you let go on the second window you get this right click menu where you can choose fast copy from the menu you can go ahead and just click execute if you want to start the data copy immediately if you want to change some of the options you can click the close box and then choose some of the options and then click execute you can also select individual files and folders so if you don't want to copy everything if you just want to pick certain files and folders you can hold the control key down and just select your individual files and then drag and drop them across as normal and the other option is you can select multiple files and folders and simply right click and choose fast copy from the menu with this method you will have to manually select the destination location by clicking on the destination box and browsing to your target location the third method to copy data with fast copy is to use the command line and for anyone who's familiar with robot copy this method is very similar yes it's more complicated than the drag and drop method but it's also much more powerful as you can create your own scripts to backup your data so once you've done the initial work of setting up your backup jobs it's as easy as running a batch file to copy all of your data and even that can be done unattended if you set up a scheduled task i recommend checking out the help file just to work out all the command syntax that you're going to need to use but you can also run the following command once you're in the fast copy directory if you type fast copy forward slash question mark that will bring up all the command line switches you can use from the command line here's an example of running fast copy from the command prompt so here's my command fast copy we then say forward slash cmd equals diff for differential backup we've then got an option to say open window so that we can see the fast copy window while it's doing the backup you can leave that option off if you just want it to run in the background and it will just put a little icon in the system tray showing you the current progress of the backup the next part is the source of the data that you want to copy so i'm just going to copy the test one folder from my data folder we then say forward slash 2 and then put in the destination path so i'm copying c data test 1 into the s drive test 1 folder we can then go ahead and press enter and that will start copying the data so i've canceled that copy and i'm gonna do the same copy but this time i'm gonna omit the open window option just to show you what it looks like when it runs in the background so let's press enter the copy process is now started but we obviously can't see any window but we do have this little fast copy icon in the system tray we hover over that it tells us what the current data that's being copied you can also double click on the icon to bring up the fast copy window as normal and here's an example of the backup script i've just got a batch file on my desktop called backup my data if we just right click and edit just to see what that is so we can see i've got three fast copy commands and they all back up different folders to the ash drive so you can put in as many commands here as you like you can select different sources different destinations and you can run them all together at the same time so i'm just doing fast copy a differential backup or so close so that once the first backup finishes it will then immediately start on the second backup and there is the destination path so if we close that script we can now simply run that back up by double clicking on the batch file and we can see that the first backup is in progress test one has appeared on the destination folder and also that we can see that fastcopy is running in the system tray you can click on that if you like but most of the time this is probably going to run unattended so it's just going to run in the background and there we are it's now moved on to the second backup and that's the backup script now completed and just like a normal fast copy you can go back and check the log files to check that the backup was successful i can browse to my fast copy directory and then go into the log directory and there is a log file for each of those three backups that will run from the backup scripts we can then check the log file just to make sure it was successful or see if there was any errors or it skipped any files and now that i've run that back up once future backups will be much quicker because fastcopy will only backup newer or change files and it will skip any existing files that are already on the destination folder so if i rerun my backup scripts now you can see that it finishes instantly because there isn't any newer or change files if i go to my c drive and go to data and go to task 1 we'll add a new test file and then if we rerun that backup it will only copy that one additional file because that's the only thing that's changed go to my destination backup there we can see the new file and finally i've done some file copy tests to compare the copy time between windows file copy robocopy and fast copy the tests are based on copying data from a local pc to a shared folder on a file server connected over a one gigabit ethernet connection i used exactly the same hardware for each test and also rebooted the pc in between each test in the first test i copied 50 000 small files from my pc to the destination folder and these were the results the built-in windows file copy took 23 minutes and seven seconds robocopy was slightly quicker and that took 19 minutes and two seconds to copy the same data and finally fast copy lived up to its name and copied the same data in just 15 minutes and 25 seconds in the second test i copied just one large file to see if there was any difference in the data transfer speed i copied a single 10 gigabit file and found that all three utilities copied the same file in two minutes and four seconds i repeated both tests to confirm the times were consistent and i got exactly the same results so in summary fastcopy is significantly faster at copying high volumes of files but when copying single large files or smaller volumes of files the copy time is similar to other copy utilities but there are additional benefits to using fast copy to copy your data such as differential copies it skips files that are already on the destination it automatically stores detailed logs of all your data copies it's simple but flexible and powerful and it can be run unattended from a script so hopefully you found that useful leave a comment if you have any questions comments or feedback and hit the like button if you enjoyed the demo subscribe to the channel for more content like this and that just leaves me to say thanks for watching and bye for now i'm

Channel: Click Next Demos

Views: 24,718

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Id: jkfZoH7QHhs

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 12 2022