Another learning. Working at Microsoft in the field (like way out in the sticks, in other words - the life of RAS), I frequently get the occasion to download files from our corporate network. Yeah!

I was doing some drag-n-drop in Windows Explorer, and thought I'm gonna just try this with XCOPY. (Years before most of my teammates were born, I had a large investment in Batch programming in DOS.) I went to a command prompt, ran a XCOPY /? to get a reminder of the commands, and I see:

NOTE: Xcopy is now deprecated, please use Robocopy.

XCOPY is still there - but what about Robocopy. I had heard the term before but never looked into it. So, off to Live search to do a look and I found several references. My findings:

• Robocopy has been included in Windows Resource Kits for several versions back
• It is included in Windows Vista.
• It has many more capabilities than my old friend, XCOPY.
• It has a progress indicator - a handy capability when accessing slow networks as in this sob story.
• Also has the capability to survive network issues and continue copying from where it left off - another good fact for my "in the sticks" scenario.
• There's a graphical front end on TechNet, called Robocopy GUI (NOV 2006). Interesting, but it doesn't show the command windows once it kicks off a copy command so I can't see progress. It does have some benefits though - like multitasking and script saving.

Back to waiting for my download of RAR's.