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I find myself needing to copy lots of data in Windows from an external hard drive to my local drive, but after instructing the File Explorer to do it via DragNDrop, it seems it's going to take a loooooooong time.

Why? Because 10min passed and it still didn't start copying. It's still "discovering":

Progress dialog:
progress dialog

So I guess my best option is doing it with the command line, and in particular, rsync, as it would allow me to stop the process at any time, and later launch it again and it would recalculate to see what's left to do, and finish the task.

Thing is, I've started to look into how to run rsync on Windows, and there seem to be several alternatives:

  • Run rsync inside WSL: but most people here say that IO between WSL and /mnt/C is very slow, like 5x-10x slower.
  • Run cygwin's rsync.
  • Run MinGW's rsync?
  • robocopy? If so, which flags do I need to make it work like rsync?
  • any other?

So yeah basically I want to know what's the best option among the above, or any other option I missed? Thanks

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    Robocopy is the way to go on Windows. Which flags can not be answered because you are not telling us how you would run rsync so we can't guess what the robocopy equivalent would be. Run "robocopy /?"for the list of options and check the link posted by matzeri
    – Tonny
    Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 22:37
  • I simply said "copy data", which means that I don't need special flags for rsync, just --recurse, from one folder to another
    – knocte
    Commented Jun 5, 2023 at 5:55
  • so "robocopy source dest /S" would just copy folder "source" with all content to folder "dest". If you want to be able to abort and restart later use /Z and /MIR as extra options. You may also want to check out /R and /W to limit the amount of retries in case something goes wrong (default is unlimited which is really bad if source is a dying harddrive) and /MT will let it run multiple threads in parallel which can make a huge difference in overall speed.
    – Tonny
    Commented Jun 5, 2023 at 18:11
  • thanks! looks like your comment is better posted as an answer, I would upvote it more than @matzeri's (PS: when u recommend /Z and /MIR, you mean for the 2nd time I run it, or all times?)
    – knocte
    Commented Jun 6, 2023 at 3:27
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    "I simply said "copy data", which means that I don't need special flags for rsync, just --recurse, from one folder to another" - I would strongly recommend the --times (-t) flag so that rsync can avoid recopying data it's already successfully copied. So rsync -rt or rsync -a
    – Chris Davies
    Commented Jun 9, 2023 at 15:16

1 Answer 1

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While rsync is useful, for local Windows copy is better to use robocopy

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/robocopy

> where robocopy
C:\Windows\System32\Robocopy.exe
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