Bought an external 1.5TB drive to migrate my data off of an older 500GB external. Ran the instruction of xcopy *.* F:\*.* /s/d/y from G: since G: is the 500GB connected via USB. Checked on it a couple times last night and saw files and folder trees scrolling as data was being copied to the larger drive. Left it running thru the night and checked on it this morning and come to find out it stopped copying when it got to a user profile that I had backed up from ages ago with Access Denied ending the transfer process.

I was wondering if there is a better way than just excluding that one path in which ON ERROR it can log what it skipped and continue with this transfer process. If so how to do this in batch or at command line. System is dual boot Windows 7 32-bit / Windows XP Pro, and I chose to use xcopy of XP vs Robocopy which I am not as familiar with on 7.

Then I can go back after the process is complete and read the log file and decide whether the data excluded is important enough to force across or just SAY its not important and move on.

I tried this transfer using windows copy/paste, but it becomes unresponsive as for I think telling windows to copy 465GB from the one drive to the 1.5TB is overwhelming it. I figured DOS ( shell ) is the best way to transfer without overwhelming windows.Is it an OPTION to use CACLS to GRANT permission to 'everyone' over the files on the drive and then just xcopy them?

What about hidden and system files?


The GUI copy will copy them and prompt you - but the initial 'parsing' of the filelist in the filesystem will take a while, particularly if there is a lot of smallish files.I have data going back to the 1980s from my 8088XT ( that I scored dumpster diving in 1985 at 10 yrs old behind a data center in NJ that I fixed - Ram chip of the 640k had a leg that was folded under itself, straightened it out and it booted without problems "Back when computers were EXPENSIVE") on this drive in an archive folder, and if my TRS-80 data would have been transferrable to IBM, that would be there too, but the TRS-80 data is long gone even the cassettes I had with programs on them; so there are LOTS of small files. Still have programs I wrote in GW-Basic many many years ago on it as 5.25" floppies got transferred to 3.5" then CD, then DVD, then external HD as the best method to store data and have immediate access to it vs TRYING to locate what disc its located on, while still keeping the optical storage media in case the external ever failed I wouldnt lose years of data.

I havent changed folder/file permissions yet. And I assumed that xcopy *.* by wildcard would grab all including hidden... maybe Im wrong on that assumption, but the profile that caused the Access Denied error definately contains hidden files and folders.

I gave windows a shot at the copy/paste and after a half hour of nothing transferred and task manager showing unresponsive I decided that command prompt is the best method to transfer data vs windows trying to assess the 'whole' of data before the transfer is to begin.Well, if you are happy to alter the permissions on the external drive then run this from the root:

Code: [Select]cacls *.* /T /C /G everyone:F
With luck it will finish without quitting (some folders on a system can make it do that - haven't figured out why)

Then you can launch this:

Code: [Select]xcopy *.* "f:\backup\" /s/h/e/k/f/c

JFTR the hidden/system files will not cause xcopy to stall - it just won't copy them by default. The command above should copy them however.Many Thanks.... Looking at what you had I was like /c ? Then looked it up with xcopy/? and saw that its used to continue if an error occurs. I forgot about that switch. If I had initially used /s/d/y/c it probably would have skipped over the access denied content.

Been using /s/d/y mainly with xcopy and sometimes /exclude: to selectively xcopy

I am just going to alter permissions and then it should work.

Thanks for the advice