RichCopy file copy utility

So I have been moving some files from one server to another at work. Windows has a built in file copy utility, a little program called Windows Explorer. If you don't know what I am talking about, it is the default file program on Windows. We usually don't think of it as a program, but it is.

I have been having trouble copying a few files over to the new computer. I found a program called RichCopy that has a lot more options. It was developed as an internal Microsoft tool so it isn't supported but at the same time not written by some 12 year old kid in his basement.

The feature I am finding most helpful right now is the console it has with errors. Explorer only told me the file name but not where the file was located. This program does. Very nice.

Update 31 Jan 2018:

Well, I found out that RichCopy still has limitations. The problem I was having with the path names being too long was imposed by Explorer itself not by the file system as I had thought. RichCopy is just a new user interface on the same old Explorer code.

I have found some other tools that I want to make note of. 

First if TotalCommander. It is a shareware program (glad to see those are still around) so costs money after the first month. This program can do a lot of things really well, but most importantly it has its own file copy code. It is not dependent on the Windows API's to access files so gets around the path names being too long.

Another tool I have used, which I think I have mentioned on this blog before but it deserves another mention, is Karen's Directory Printer. It will parse through a folder tree and save a list of all the files and folders in the tree. You can select which attributes you want to save; I have been saving the full path name, file size, and an MD5 hash of the file so I can confirm the file's identity if there is a question.

While I prefer Notepad++ for the vast majority of my text editing needs, it can't handle the files that Karen's creates (900 MB). I used a program called HJ-Split to split the files up which worked very well. It can split and join files, but with the text files I could open them directly after the split. HJ-Split is simple but gets the job done. 

I didn't like having to work with partial files though so I kept looking. A coworker pointed me to EditPad Lite, a Notepad++ competitor that follows a freemium model. Its claim to fame is that EditPad can open very large files. It worked very well, and since it support regular expressions in the search and replace function I was able to make a few edits to the logs (mostly removing the beginning of the file path since they didn't match leaving the folder structure from the root down). I got a step closer but unfortunately the file compare features in EditPad is a paid feature.

I attempted to used the built in Windows functions, dif and comp, but while they could handle the size of the files, dif got lost when it found a change that was too big for it to track and comp only compares files at the binary level not as text.

Which brings me to DiffMerge, a file compare utility that can compare very large files. It has a nice user interface that illustrates the differences very nicely. While the option to show only the differences is a paid feature, it is far more usable than I was begining to believe I would find.

So there you go. If you need to compare large files it may take bouncing around between programs, but I finally figured a set of tools that will get the job done.