Difference between xcopy and robocopy

Question

I'm kind of new to batch scripting. As a newbie I find both both of them useful while scripting What are the key differences between xcopy and robocopy?

Eileen

Answer 1

Robocopy replaces XCopy in the newer versions of windows

1. Uses Mirroring, XCopy does not
2. Has a /RH option to allow a set time for the copy to run
3. Has a /MON:n option to check differences in files
4. Copies over more file attributes than XCopy

Yes i agree with Mark Setchell, They are both crap. (brought to you by Microsoft)

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UPDATE:

XCopy return codes:

0 - Files were copied without error.
1 - No files were found to copy.
2 - The user pressed CTRL+C to terminate xcopy. enough memory or disk space, or you entered an invalid drive name or invalid syntax on the command line.
5 - Disk write error occurred.

Robocopy returns codes:

0 - No errors occurred, and no copying was done. The source and destination directory trees are completely synchronized.
1 - One or more files were copied successfully (that is, new files have arrived).
2 - Some Extra files or directories were detected. No files were copied Examine the output log for details. 
3 - (2+1) Some files were copied. Additional files were present. No failure was encountered.
4 - Some Mismatched files or directories were detected. Examine the output log. Some housekeeping may be needed.
5 - (4+1) Some files were copied. Some files were mismatched. No failure was encountered.
6 - (4+2) Additional files and mismatched files exist. No files were copied and no failures were encountered. This means that the files already exist in the destination directory
7 - (4+1+2) Files were copied, a file mismatch was present, and additional files were present.
8 - Some files or directories could not be copied (copy errors occurred and the retry limit was exceeded). Check these errors further.
16 - Serious error. Robocopy did not copy any files. Either a usage error or an error due to insufficient access privileges on the source or destination directories.

There is more details on Robocopy return values here: http://ss64.com/nt/robocopy-exit.html and XCopy here: https://ss64.com/nt/xcopy.html

Santonin

Much more constructive than my answer, but far less fun :-) – Cicada

Note that XCopy returns a standard exit code (zero on success, nonzero on failure) while Robocopy does not. – Unequaled

is there any (free and/or open source) better solution for auto backup files in a windows server to another windows server? My Company has too much windows server, and they don't give me money to buy any license for this task. – Damson

I can tell you one f..kin big difference I've just had 3 minutes ago: you go to a directory on your network. Shift-Right click "open powershell here". Then try "robocopy "." "D:\tmp\" /MOV" (D: is a physical hard drive). This work. Turn off the computer that shares that directory (while copying). This won't work with tons of errors, press CTRL-C and try again. robocopy has tried to move all the files from the C:\Windows\System32 directory. True. You can't do that with xcopy. – Encaustic

@OlivierPons, I can repro. Definitely a bug in Powershell, the same thing happens with any external command, not just robocopy. That means it isn't really relevant to this question because the OP is programming in batch, not in Powershell, but if you must use Powershell then you could use its Copy-Item or Move-Item cmdlets instead of external tools, or you could give robocopy the fully qualified path. – Douglas

Sorry for being angry, but after more than 20 years, still not being able to make a command-line utility that moves files safely in totally un-professional. Linux for the win. – Encaustic

@OlivierPons, understandable, I just wanted to clarify that the problem wasn't in robocopy so using a third-party command-line tool wouldn't help. As for the Powershell issue, I've filed a bug report, but I'm not going to hold my breath. – Douglas

Answer 2

The most important difference is that robocopy will (usually) retry when an error occurs, while xcopy will not. In most cases, that makes robocopy far more suitable for use in a script.

Addendum: for completeness, there is one known edge case issue with robocopy; it may silently fail to copy files or directories whose names contain invalid UTF-16 sequences. If that's a problem for you, you may need to look at third-party tools, or write your own.

Douglas

Can you link to documentation that describes this behavior? – Haiku

With what I've just had I'll never use robocopy again. Never ever. Not safe at all. Microsoft should finish properly such programs before releasing it. You copy from the network, the network is down, then it tries to move files from where it is and... it's C:\Windows\System32. Good job Microsoft, after 20 years still not able to make a program that moves properly files. I'll show this example to my students so they'll understand why they have to go to Linux. – Encaustic

@OlivierPons, I've been using robocopy for twenty years and never had any problems. Certainly it has never copied files to or from the wrong place! Can you explain in more detail what you think went wrong and how to reproduce it? – Douglas

So in 20 years you've just never had network problems while copying. You're lucky, end of story. And read all comments and answers about xcopy vs robocopy... they talk by themselves. – Encaustic

@OlivierPons, of course I have - that's the whole point of using robocopy, because it keeps going after a network glitch instead of stopping dead. – Douglas

... for completeness, there is one known issue with robocopy when dealing with filenames that contain invalid UTF-16 sequences, but that's likely to be an issue with most third-party tools as well. I'll add a note to my answer anyway. (And as already mentioned, your problem was probably caused by Powershell rather than by robocopy. Microsoft's fault either way, of course.) – Douglas

Sorry for being angry, but after more than 20 years, still not being able to make a command-line utility that moves files safely in totally un-professional. Linux for the win. – Encaustic

For the benefit of future readers, Olivier's problems were caused by Powershell, not Robocopy. – Douglas

Answer 3

The differences I could see is that Robocopy has a lot more options, but I didn't find any of them particularly helpful unless I'm doing something special.

I did some benchmarking of several copy routines and found XCOPY and ROBOCOPY to be the fastest, but to my surprise, XCOPY consistently edged out Robocopy.

It's ironic that robocopy retries a copy that fails, but it also failed a lot in my benchmark tests, where xcopy never did.

I did full file (byte by byte) file compares after my benchmark tests.

Here are the switches I used with robocopy in my tests:

 **"/E /R:1 /W:1 /NP /NFL /NDL"**.  

If anyone knows a faster combination (other than removing /E, which I need), I'd love to hear.

Another interesting/disappointing thing with robocopy is that if a copy does fail, by default it retries 1,000,000 times with a 30 second delay between each try. If you are running a long batch file unattended, you may be very disappointed when you come back after a few hours to find it's still trying to copy a particular file.

The /R and /W switches let you change this behavior.

• With /R you can tell it how many times to retry,
• /W let's you specify the wait time before retries.

If there's a way to attach files here, I can share my results.

• My tests were all done on the same computer and
• copied files from one external drive to another external,
• both on USB 3.0 ports.

I also included FastCopy and Windows Copy in my tests and each test was run 10 times. Note, the differences were pretty significant. The 95% confidence intervals had no overlap.

Vickievicksburg

You answer is a little difficult to read, you should format it a bit more. You can use ` for inline code ` (its the squiggle/tilde key that looks like this: ~) and enter twice for a new paragraph. – Karlotta

Sorry, When I wrote it, it had blank lines to separate things. – Vickievicksburg

I had a lot of problems with ROBOCOPY failing because people used to delete user accounts from Active Directory when they left the company, and their SIDs were the owners of some files or in their DACLs. Whenever robocopy hit such a file it would crash. It was a nightmare. – Jacquesjacquet

Performances: Use /log:mylogfile.log, which is faster than displaying on screen. This count when copying millions of files. Also use /MT to add more cores (default to 8, my current desktop has 24), but better yet: launch n single thread robocopy jobs in parallel (n = number of cores). If you plan to copy millions of files, copy the files first and then the ACL. – Arabela

Answer 4

Its painful to hear people are still suffering at the hands of *{COPY} whatever the version. I am a seasoned batch and Bash script writer and I recommend rsync , you can run this within cygwin (cygwin.org) or you can locate some binaries floating around . and you can redirect output to 2>&1 to some log file like out.log for later analysing. Good luck people its time to love life again . =M. Kaan=

Mattheus

Or go for Linux forever as well. Better choice IMHO. – Encaustic

After 2-3 with Robocopy which looks good at first, I'll try rsync. Robocopy has horrible issues, the summary is totally wrong, the default value for multi-threading is mostly totally wrong/slow for all stuff i copied, resume didn't work. Just take a look at the github repo and the issue, it's far from a good product. It even overwrites System Volume Info and the recovery dir and destroys the drives. Unbelievable. – Integrant

I'm a Linux fan trapped in a Windows world. I rely on msys2 to keep me sane. However, rsync under msys has proven to be much too slow for local disk copy operations, and I can't find an rsync compiled with mingw64. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but robocopy solves my speed issue (at the expense of missing copy verification, which I would blame for the speed difference except that under Linux it's still very fast). – Lacker

Answer 5

I have written lot of scripts to automate daily backups etc. Previously I used XCopy and then moved to Robocopy. Anyways Robocopy and XCopy both are frequently used in terms of file transfers in Windows. Robocopy stands for Robust File Copy. All type of huge file copying both these commands are used but Robocopy has added options which makes copying easier as well as for debugging purposes.

Having said that lets talk about features between these two.

• Robocopy becomes handy for mirroring or synchronizing directories. It also checks the files in the destination directory against the files to be copied and doesn't waste time copying unchanged files.

• Just like myself, if you are into automation to take daily backups etc, "Run Hours - /RH" becomes very useful without any interactions. This is supported by Robocopy. It allows you to set when copies should be done rather than the time of the command as with XCopy. You will see robocopy.exe process in task list since it will run background to monitor clock to execute when time is right to copy.

• Robocopy supports file and directory monitoring with the "/MON" or "/MOT" commands.

• Robocopy gives extra support for copying over the "archive" attribute on files, it supports copying over all attributes including timestamps, security, owner, and auditing information.

Hope this helps you.

City

When you use /RH does that mean the command will always run at that time without any interaction, even after restart? – Subbasement

Answer 6

I recently had a need to copy 12 TB of data to prepare for a RAID conversion. In my research and experience with the process, I winded-up using xcopy, utilizing the following parameters:

xcopy D: E: /C/H/E/R/Y/D /EXCLUDE:C:\EXCLUDE.TXT

The exclude file needed to be created by the PC administrator, otherwise, it will not be interpreted. Inside the Exclude file, add each directory one line at a time. Then, use a Command UI, as an Administrator to execute the xcopy command. Another thing, I needed to create a link to my other PC with "net use E:", etc... Otherwise, the Drive letter would not work if a Mapped Drive was created from a Right-Click, for instance.

As far as Speed is concerned, I found xcopy to me much faster than robocopy. I tried multiple parameters with robocopy, but it never seemed to take off like xcopy did during my sessions. Additionally, I can stop the copy session with the "CMD C" option at any time and return where I left off without issues. Robocopy exibited the same behavior; so there was no difference in that area.

Dysgenics

Answer 7

They are both rubbish! XCOPY was older and unreliable, so Microsoft replaced it with ROBOCOPY, which is still rubbish.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-files/robocopy-appears-to-be-broken-in-windows-8/9a7634c4-3a9d-4f2d-97ae-093002a638a9

Don't worry though, it is a long-standing tradition that was started by the original COPY command, which to this day, still needs the /B switch to get it to actually copy properly!

Cicada

copy defaults to /b on binary files now. I'm not sure where you get your hatred of robocopy from... your link just shows that the archive attribute is being utilised as it is designed. – Cynar

Robocopy works perfectly well up to and including Windows 7. If it has been broken in Windows 8 ... well, that doesn't actually surprise me much. Maybe Windows 10 will be better. – Douglas

Can you be a little more constructive and suggest an alternative please? – Photoactinic

@MarkCooper Yes, either install Linux or install VirtualBox and put Linux on the VirtualBox then use rsync or cp. – Cicada

@MarkSetchell Terrible answer. Judging by your rep you should know better. – Photoactinic

@MarkCooper The answer addresses the question which, to remind you, asked about "the differences" not to recommend an alternative. My answer is that there is little difference because both tools are poor - and I stand by that answer. If you have a different question, please ask it as a new one instead of piggybacking off other people's questions. – Cicada

@MarkSetchell you have not answered OP's question, instead giving your own opinion about how much you dislike XCOPY and ROBOCOPY. This isn't fact, it isn't constructive and does nothing to help OP. – Photoactinic

i don't see this answer as hatred. I see humor in it. And god knows why there have to be 3 versions of a command that does copy function. copy, xcopy & robocopy... why not build on the single copy? For any new block to windows world of scripting. this is making a steep learning curve unlike the shell programming. – Volvulus

@OK9999: it makes sense once you know the history. Both copy and xcopy were part of DOS, and they had to be separate because copy was an internal command and xcopy an external one. Windows included them both for backwards compatibility. The robocopy command was originally developed by a separate team, initially for internal use and later as part of the resource kit. It didn't become a built-in part of Windows until later on. (I'm also dubious about the claim that shell programming doesn't have a steep learning curve. The syntax is pretty darned abtruse!) – Douglas

Your response was the best and as a result, i didn't use either and just use the plain copy command and it worked great. Sorry it took so long to respond – Vickievicksburg

Hard to believe, how many people hate this answer. Upvoting it. Was trying to ROBOCOPY a file for ages. It's too stupid to do it. Tried XCOPY, at least that one knows how to copy a single file. On Linux: cp file1.txt file1.txt.bak - done. – Ubald

Translation of Harry Johnston's last comment: "It makes sense once you know the history. Back then, people used horses, rather than cars. So, it absolutely makes sense, that horses are pulling airplanes now. It's just natural." – Ubald

@Akito, robocopy is roughly analogous to rsync, i.e., it is meant for copying directories, not single files. I believe rsync has similar limitations. – Douglas