Hacker News Reader

Comment by patrickk | Hacker News Reader

A word of warning about TerraCopy- it can cause annoying errors when copying. I transferred many gigs of data from one computer to another over a LAN, some files transferred fine, others looked like they copied ok, but were actually 0kb in size on closer look.

I'm not sure if it was a bug in that particular version or with the setup being used, but once I uninstalled TerraCopy the errors ceased.

View on HN

TC occasionally bombs out if you queue too much stuff - i.e. it just closes ... and thus looks like its done when really its not. Maybe thats why you got 0kb files.

Win7 + copying is decent enough for most non-lan purposes though.

Speaking on copying failing - I stopped using TotalCommander for that reason. It just says disk full (not true) out of the blue. Messaged the author & got some bullshit response.

You would think that queuing lots of files would be where TerraCopy really shines- faster copying combined with a nice view of the copy queue, with percentages and so on.

I was disappointed to uninstall it because it worked well for normal copying on the same pc and the UI is very informative, but the bog-standard windows copying functionality can handle as much stuff as you can throw at it which is the whole point of a copy tool in the first place.

> Win7 + copying is decent enough for most non-lan purposes though.

It's not. If a single file fails on Win7 it cancels the whole operation (how is that possible on an OS released in 2009?! Fixed in Win8 though, that will never be used in corporations though), it fails if the path becomes longer than 255 characters etc.

Robocopy works but I'd much rather use rsync which is not available on Windows unless you use hacked up versions with cygwin.

A good reliable copying tool is sorely missing. Sure, there's all sorts of alternatives but I'm not willing to use it unless it's open source. The other comment on this thread talking about FastCopy got me curious, I'll have to try that (it's open source!).

I'm trying swiss file knife for multi purpose file handling (including a somewhat delta copying) and it's proving to be a good tool.

>> unless you use hacked up versions with cygwin

I use standard Cygwin and rsync and ssh when I have to use Windows and use them to backup Windows to a Linux box and it works great.

>If a single file fails on Win7 it cancels the whole operation

No it doesn't? It pauses it & gives you an option to retry / cancel. So if another app is using the file you can close it & continue.

The only time I had Total Commander stop a copy like that was with bad usb hubs/drives that can't sustain fast writes and need to be down throttled. This is the reason why tcmd has option to change how it handles drives, the size of the chunks it reads and writes, and the speed at which it does it.

FastCopy does everything TeraCopy does, but faster and better: http://ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en

(this is the only tool I miss when working on Linux)

On XP - perhaps, but on Windows 7 and up FastCopy and TeraCopy are both slower than or marginally comparable to robocopy, which is a built-in bulk copying tool. Microsoft did an amazing job with it in W7, robocopy is really damn fast.

I have used Robocopy to move over 300TB of data round recently and not a single error. Robocopy is at UNIX level stability. Really a kick ass tool.

Are you sure about that?

It's hard to find benchmarks, but things seem to point in the direction of fastcopy still being faster.

See e.g. http://www.sepago.de/e/helge/2011/05/17/fastcopy-free-file-c... (robocopy comparison at the end)

Would be great to see benchmarks of course! :)

Yeah, positive. Just ran a quick test copying 3GB .iso from local HDD to USB3 drive.

  fastcopy - 152 sec (average of 3 fastest runs out of 4)
  robocopy - 65 sec

Incidentaly, tried the same with my backup program and it's 62 seconds, faster than both.

Thanks for mentioning this, I've been looking for such a tool for a while now. It's open source too (a requirement for me)!

My items that I miss in Linux - anyone know any good replacements ? Aabby & Visio

Few items for ubuntu/crunchbang: virtualbox - docker -krusader/rsync/filezilla - file mgmt - autokey - python automation -gimp 2.8.10 - 2.10 will bring gpu/multicore support - bittorent sync (been meaning to try owncloud) kate text editor - terminator/finalterm - advanced terminal clementine - firefox - lucifox/ghostery/abe/sqlite manager etc - pdfmod

Reply on news.ycombinator.com