Five Best Alternative File Copiers

Hate to rule this test untrustworthy, but...

When you access a file, there are two caches involved: hard drive cache and OS memory cache. So I bet if you did this same test in a different order, you'd get different results. The best way to test this would be to reboot the computer right before each test. I'd do this but GNU's coreutils will do all the stuff that these copiers do. On top of that rsync is a copier on steroids compared to these ones.

krechet

@paintbox: I smell a TROLL. Go back under your bridge ;-}

@nathannecro: I believe it's 'exactomundo'.

^(*.*)^

@SiddheshwariDamrit: Don't you see? TeraCopy is for moving large files. The built-in Windows copying is made for moving small files since that is what most home users will be doing.

@Jason Fitzpatrick: Perfect answer!

ossigeno

@Smok3y: Ditto for Teracopy in Vista for me.

LoneWolf008

@askj113: I use Teracopy, but I don't use it as the default file copier. When I want to copy large files, I use the right-click option and "Teracopy it". Seems to work well for me. All other small file transfers are left to the default windows copier. As far as I can tell, Teracopy doesn't have the option for transfers over a certain size.

One thing I do like about Teracopy is the option to run as administrator, which works quite well at getting around the UAC in Vista.

LoneWolf008

@joelena: Besides recovering data as you say, it works just fine for copying big amount of files, it also has command line options like some of the above.

Just like teracopy or supercopier, select the source and the target and hit go.

hanswr

Which one's the best at copying files through a home network?

antoniomax

I just tried Teracopy and found that windows Vista default copier actually was faster at 41mb/s as apposed to teracopy at 20mb/s. It was a 355mb RAR file.

wakebordr

xplorer2 does most, or probably all, of what these program do and is built into the file manager, which does so much more. There is a free version too.

pschroeter

TeraCopy is KICKING ASS!!!!!!1111!!!

grewal12

@Jon Nettleton:
Did you click the register Copy Handler button aswell.
I know it might sound thick, but I often miss it when installing on new machines.

Jeketem

@ADiSH: Ditto.

Teracopy never failed me. My HDD has, but teracopy, nevah!
;)

@johnsmith1234: The program may look ghetto, but that looks like a screenshot from Windows 95 or something. The Website is a little ghetto too.

Total Copy is another program
[www.ranvik.net]

Very low resource usage, works on Windows 98 and newer:
Pause / resume, resume on power failure, speedlimit, shows copy speed, context menu integration.

@themusicalrunner: Here you go:
[www.aquataskforce.com]

I too prefer robocopy. It's command line, but I have an old .bat file that I always just make a copy of and modify. Here's the command line I use to copy all contents of 1 folder (e.g. from C:) to another destination (e.g. to D:)

c:\robocopy\robocopy.exe C:\STORAGE D:\STORAGE /z /e /R:1 /W:1 /LOG:"C:\RoboCopyLog.txt" /TEE

Hope someone finds this useful. Robocopy comes with a doc that explains all the switches. Be sure you get robocopy XP010.. it's slightly newer than another version of robocopy.

FTFA: "Supercopier's the only alternative copier here that makes itself the default drag-and-drop handler while the program is active."

FTFTeraCopy options menu: "Use TeraCopy as default copy handler. Handle drag and drop files using left mouse button as well as copy and paste commands in Explorer."

And yes, this is true for the portable version as well.

WilletteEchidna

@askj113: Copying one 1.39GB file from one USB external HDD to another, Teracopy does it at a rate of ~4.3 MB/s while Fastcopy only manages ~3.6 MB/s, which seems to contradict what I used to think about the relative speeds of the two utilities (and most of the other comparisons out there on the web).

But whatever the case, if you're using one of these utilities you'll probably be waiting around quite some time anyway owing to large data volumes, so small speed differences are probably not hugely important - far more important is features and usability.

arctanb

@here's a list of 25 portable ones). None of the above programs handle that.

@mr_peeks: teracopy can calculate crc of files before & after copying, so you're sure the files are exactly the same on destination

keynell

I'm sure I'm missing something - but how do I get Teracopy to handle file copying by default in xp?

'Use teracopy as default copy handler' is selected in the options but if I copy & paste it just uses the standard XP function? I've restarted, re-selected etc but it doesn't seem to help. Thanks

Jon Nettleton

My votes goes to Teracopy, but could someone tell me if there's a multilanguage option, on those who are listed.I'm looking for a spanish alternative

GiPiKay

ohh..... weary groan...... I'm really sick of Mac and nix folk nosing in on Windows-only threads. Said it already.... even a couple of leeches are a couple too many.

There is a reason for tags. And 'keep out' signs and no _____ need apply.

You know where your sandbox is. Get the **** over there and quit commenting here.

paintbox

@themusicalrunner: Ah. Troll. I wish I could do something other than feed you. I think I will block you instead. Say hi to the echo chamber for me.

paintbox

@Meocene: It's not so much the speeds, but Window's tendency to freak out and stop as soon as it wants to ask you a question.

I use the default copy on Windows usually, but when I really want to slug some bits around (where the copy time will exceed an hour or two) I use a third-party handler. If nothing else, when it hits a problem it will move on with copying files instead of just stopping.

@Israel Muñoz: Mirror

paintbox

@Ravi K. Udeshi: Maybe you shouldn't have switched...?

paintbox

Not even at least Mac & Linux-compatible honorable mentions?

Avian00

Thanks!!!

Israel Muñoz

This is going to be a sweep for teracopy. For good reasons too.

just did a small test copying the windows 7 ISO (2.5gb) from D: drive to C: Drive. Obviously things are different with lots of smaller files.

Copy Times:

Windows 7 - 1:55
* Reported 24mb/sec
* Stupid thing said "60 seconds remaining" half the time

FastCopy - 1:33
*Reported 24-25mb/sec
*Ugly, no progress indicator, just ETA

TeraCopy - 1:35
* Reported 30mb/sec
* Marginally slower, shell drag/drop integration works, love accurate progress bar and eta

I dont know, i think Teracopy just made me a convert just cuz fastcopy looks like asshole

Too lazy to test the others, or small files.

CHEERS MATES

Drogean

@askj113:

Well after I copied some files totaling 179MB, and using an actual stopwatch which may be a bit off, here are the results:

TeraCopy - 11:06 sec
Copy Handler - 10:75 sec
FastCopy - 9:97 sec
RichCopy - 7:72 sec
SuperCopier - 13:42 sec

All done on a 1.6Ghz AMD Turion64x2 proc, 2GB RAM, 300GB 5200RPM drive (I think). Had basic stuff opened (Windows Explorer, Notepad)

I'll have to do a more in depth timing and post it somewhere.

James Liu

Teracopy. Worked great for me when copying ~750GB to my nas. I've just allowed it to replace the windows shell copy.

I think I must be the only person here who thinks Wins file copier is fine.
I get read/writes of typically 80Mb/s...
Anyone else get those speeds?
I'm not raided.

@Israel Muñoz:

You could create a BAT or VBS file to do the copying.

SScorpio

@Jason Fitzpatrick: Exactomuno
^__^

nathannecro

Are there any good alternative file copiers for a Mac? I dearly miss TeraCopy since switching.

Ravi K. Udeshi

@jsmorley: I haven't tried TeraCopy in Win7 yet, but in XP for me TeraCopy is MUCH faster and far more reliable than the built-in file copier.

Unstoppable Copier should be in this list...

Anyway.

Vote: TeraCopy

hanswr

@Israel Muñoz: you're going to need a script for that. it's not that difficult, others can help you better than i can tho.

@Xaro: fast copy works in xplorer^2

any of the ones that have shell integration should work in xplorer^2 because it's just an alternative interface for windows explorer.

@askj113: ctrl-c, ctrl-v are your new best friends for copying only a few files

@[www.portablefreeware.com]

LethAL

@themusicalrunner:

copying files is so limited: i suppose if all you wanted to do was to replicate a file (or any other construct) you could simply dd it via pipes (as buffers) to move it at speeds Windows can only dream about, but there is so much more you can do w/o sacrificing speed (tar, cpio, apio, rsync, etc.) by just opening a terminal window...

gmerin

Ok, those programs seem great, but I need a function that all those 5 are missing, and actually, I'm not sure if it even exists on any other copying software.

I was thinking of a portable .exe on my usb, I execute it, and it copies a predetermined folder... is it even possible?

Israel Muñoz

All I can say is thanks. I read the article asking people which copy program they used, so I installed TerraCopy. Things copied faster then the normal 3-5 minutes I was used to.

I prefer command line utility: RoboCopy.

thexile

@mr_peeks:

Not much... It isn't any faster than the built in copy routines in Windows 7, and crashes quite a bit. I would stay away from it for mission critical things.

jsmorley

@mr_peeks: Let's say you're copying your entire MP3 collection to an external drive for safe keeping. You start the copy, watch the little pages fly between the two folders and marvel at how Windows insists it will take some absurd amount of time like 88 days to copy your data.

You come back 3 hours later and it's frozen and you have no idea which files have been copied. You can attempt to compare the files on the external disk to the files on your computer and carefully select only the ones that didn't copy properly, but that's a huge pain in the ass and if you're not careful you might miss an important file.

Using one of the above copiers ensures, at minimum, that when transferring lots of files you don't end up tearing your hair out.

The increased transfer speed thanks to more efficient and copy handling is just a big bonus on top of that ;-)

@mr_peeks: I use teracopy, and the things i like about it more than the default are:

1) much faster / reliable
2) doesn't get hung up on problem files. will just skip them and keep going, and then you can go deal with the problem files later.

i believe there are other fancy things you can do with it, (see description of it in article), but this is really all i use it for.

CaptJackDaniels

TeraCopy yo.

@themusicalrunner: If nothing else, you could use the Unix command-line copy tool in Terminal. I haven't had issues with copying, but in some situations it's definitely faster to use rm to delete files than the Finder/system Trash...or to delete files that the Trash won't for whatever reason.

Rsync is for slightly different purposes I feel. I use it in linux to backup my files and its great for that, but for day to day copying needs its unnecessary.

Teracopy was the one I found when I was first copying large chunks of data, and have stuck with it since!

this is definitely a case of people voting with what they're used to. i used to use teracopy. in fact, it was the first one i ever used, and it was because of the lifehacker article. but after a few months of using it and having to deal with the little problems here and there, i tried out a few other similar programs and have switched to fastcopy for my vista and xp machines. for windows 7, i like the default copier (windows 7 is fast!).

onlysublime

i've used Fast and Tera both for some period of time and definitely prefer Fast. seems faster (subjectively) but i just like the options and the ability to elevate privileges.

cheeebs

I don't really understand this. Could someone please explain what's wrong with the regular Windows file transfer system? I understand that being able to Pause is great, but what are the other advantages?

mr_peeks

FastCopy frustrates me because there is no "pause" function. Like CopyHandler though it CAN be set to shut down, suspend, or hibernate your computer upon completion of the copy.

I use Teracopy but it crash copying litlle files...I tried kill copy too but.. I dont like at all....

SiddheshwariDamrit

I tried Fastcopy and Teracopy for the same 8GB file from the same device to the same location and found no difference in speed: the one was copied exactly as fast as the other. It looks like Teracopy has a better shell integration. All the best,

TimothyPlancus

I like teracopy, I tried others, but they wouldn't integrate well with xPlorer^2

my vote would go for the windows port of rsync. yes, command line. but *extremely* versatile!

Ashish Vijayaram

no mac copiers? i guess the default one actually works :)

I'd be interested in seeing some speed tests between these if anyone's up for it...

Also do any of these support only opening for file transfers over a certain size? Because it seems like overkill to have this huge window pop up with all these settings when I'm just moving a word doc.

teracopy is the only one i tried but i never felt i need to change it, works great..

Teracopy completely screwed my computer...not good...

taipan_snake

@johnsmith1234: doesn't look too horrible, but that speedlimit slider reminds me of the turbo button on my 486dx66. "I would like my computer to run slower, I think I'll push this button" - "I would like this copy to take longer because I have nothing better to do, good thing I can move this slider down"

mahumphrey

@Drogean: your comment was crude, but funny and true.

mahumphrey

@jsmorley: yeah, because unstable apps on a beta OS is obviously the apps fault... I would stay away from a beta OS for mission critical things, lol.

hakujin1

+1 CLI... its on everything guaranteed.

daybringer

My experience is limited to two of these
fast copy and teracopy, and speed is hard to compare between the two
Fast copy at first Seems faster, but that's because by default hash checking is turned of, whereas teracopy does a quick crc check by default
teracopy has no way to disable the crc checking
in fastcopy if you turn on hash checking it uses MD5 a more complex/slower algorithm. this makes comparing the "speed" of these two utilities difficult, especially on older systems where the hash checking can take a significant amount of time

theeo123

@Cyfun: I'm running Vista 64-bit and Terracopy is working fine...though I installed one of the 2.0 beta's

compuguy1088

that "blazingly fast" image is funny. 120 km/h is only around 75 mph. i-287 by my house in NJ is regularly 80 mph in the slow lane, let alone regular traffic speed.

Joe Lyga

@Avian00: While there where no honourable mentions for the platforms you can look forward to the open source Copy Handler being ported to Linux 'someday'!
[www.copyhandler.com]

@gmerin: dd is too subject to mistakes for this, and I think piping is a little bit of overkill for dragging homework to a flash drive. You can't seriously justify telling comptarded people to do this.

Angry Numismatist

@WilletteEchidna: The key words are "while the program is active." The option in TeraCopy is to replace the default copy handler all the time, not just while the program is open.

radiantchains

No votes for Killcopy?

[lifehacker.com]

dre12n

@themusicalrunner: Until one day it hiccups on 1 file in the middle of a massive transfer and stops the process all together. Third party copy utilities still hold an important place on both Macs and PCs because they are smart enough to skip over corrupt files.

Curtiss Spontelli

I would gladly use TeraCopy if only it worked with bloody 64bit. Stuck with Copyhandler. :(

Cyfun

You guys should link to your older posts. I remember you did a test comparing fast copy to tera copy that showed fast copy leading by a considerable margin.

I know I switched from teracopy to fastcopy for moving large files from drive to drive and fast copy has always been faster. Although most people don't move multi-gigabyte files around a lot

SmilingCat

TeraCopy gets my vote. Shell integration is a must-have. Efficient, stable and simple to use.

freeman70

i use the copier routine in directory opus!

PaladinMJ

@hanswr: Yeah, I second Unstoppable Copier. Never see it in these sorts of lists though.

adrift98

Kinda surprised to see Teracopy winning, it sometimes has a bad habit of missing one or two files in the teracopy queue out of a selection of files you choose to "teracopy" in windows explorer.

As you see, need an alternative in case I did a large file copy job and can't be bothered to check if everything got copied.

aarste

Regarding CopyHandler, I've encountered what seems to be a bug. OS is Windows 7 RC, when CH is active, I am unable to extract files from a zipped file. It will go through all of the motions including creating a folder for the extracted files, but when you open the newly created folder, it is empty. Turn off CH, extract files, and everything goes according to plan. I confess I only took a cursory look, and maybe it is a correctable item that I missed in the options on CH. Just thought others may want to be aware of the issue.

OwenCeyx

Teracopy is one of the few programs I actually bought. They are doing nightly builds now, but a few bugs (mostly network related) are still present and v2 takes out the manual adjusting of buffer size. I've never found that helping much anyways. I've tried all the others other than SuperCopy, but always finding myself moving back to Teracopy for various reasons. RichCopy might be a good candidate if someone could implement shell integration.

HexiumVII

You guys fail to mention robocopy. This is the best copy command line utility ever. And I think there is a gui version now also. It copies preserving file permission and security so you don't have to do anything afterwards. Most people won't need to use this, but if you are moving a storage device to a new one...this is the utility you want to use. It will retry file that are in use and it will recursively do directories within directories within directories. This is probably not the fastest, but very reliable. When some copy fails, this one will not.

Thai Tea

@Jason Fitzpatrick:

Looking at your scenario, I take it SuperCopier and/or TeraCopy will pop up a result window, indicating which file(s) did not copy?

@cheeebs: Im the same way tried Tera and Fast, prefer Fast

@Meocene: at least on XP, if you want to copy a bunch of files from different places to one, and you don't want to move them you can

a) copy and paste one, then another, then another, and then, after a couple days watching how it does not advance, stop it and proceed to b)

b) copy one, wait in front of the computer until it's done, then repeat with other

In addition to the hugest annoyance ever: you're copying over 50GB to an external drive, start copying and go to sleep, and then the next day you come back and see that after copying the first 100MB, it stopped because it couldn't keep copying without asking you if you were sure you wanted to copy that thumbs.db file, because you know, it's a system file and can be dangerous to copy.

If you think the windows copier is fine, either you're using vista (i think the last one was fixed on vista) or you haven't had to copy huge amounts of files. Good look in your next formatting / buying a bigger HDD.

rafasan

@LoneWolf008: The speed depends a lot on whether you're copying a huge file or a huge bunch of tiny files, for what I read here. I think fastcopy outperformed tera in the second case.

rafasan

@Gonz: I uninstalled it after running with some trouble with my external HDD AND pendrive.

Turned out the USB cable for one, AND the USB port for the other, were broken.

I'm a happy user again

rafasan

I'm surprised that teracopy seems to always get such high ratings. Whenever I see articles that bring up the subject of replacement copiers, there always seem to be posts about how teracopy has some flaws...

I don't like the windows copy that just halts if it has an issue, but at least it doesn't mess up in other ways. The Last thing I want is a copy replacement that has flaws.

sjkeegs

@Joe Lyga: ummm that's 120 mph (the 180 kmh matches the 110 mph, which is about right)

drsoumunblocked

though technically not a copying enhancer, when i need to copy many files i turn to syncback. again, not for everyday use, but if you run into that scenario once a month or so, it certainly does the job (runs in the background, provides a log of errors, etc)

drsoumunblocked

TeraCopy has never failed since I first installed it, so far....

by the way, what's the name of the theme you used in those screenshots, Jason? :)

Hollow24

teracopy gets way too many votes, its free version is just crippled. basic commmon sense features...not crashing on running out of space ..not there. queue management is goddamned primitive. i think it gets a ton of votes because it looks like its doing something faster...all those progress bars/slicker gui. use it for a while and its over simplistic nature becomes a burden. copy handler gives you control over the queue and has basic common sense features.

Justifan

Vote: TeraCopy. I'm using it on two XP computers and I'm thoroughly satisfied. CopyHandler wouldn't even install on an older XP machine, and shell integration is a must for me.

LLane

so whats the comparison of Teracopy or Killcopy vs Xcopy?
xcopy (is the copy command sitting in 2000, xp,vista & hopefully an inproved version in 7)

Marquist Cooper