Discussion on:

Is there any way to make MS "copy" into a smart copy?

This happens too many times to make a joke about it - last night I set a 6.4 GB folder to be copied to an external drive by using the right-click copy, right click paste command in Explorer. I woke up this morning to a window asking me a question about one of the file YET to be copied - it had hardly started from the looks of the completion bar.
WHY can't a computer, when asked to copy something, review all the files, separate out the problematic ones, ask all the questions BEFORE it starts, and then complete it quickly - I'm copying from a SATA to a 1 Tb External HDD and besides already taking all night, it is still reporting in excess of 80 minutes to "complete" - of course, that is unless it finds another problem.
CAN a pc copy quickly? This is a quad core Phenom II running at 3.75Ghz, with 8GB of DDR3 matched memory. How stupid is it to write a dumb copy program that is less intelligent than my shoe, in 2011? Why can't it resolve all issues before the copy? Why not at least copy everything it can and then ask about what's left, rather than stopping like some stupid, blind mouse stuck at the end of a corridor?

i'm not a programmer....are u? maybe you should create it and patent it..lock MS out in the cold so to speak

well it ran all day - all day - then locked up; a reboot showed no trace of any copying; the root directory being copied from, digital_2010, was no where to be found on any of my drives. I watched the files get copied endlessly in the window, and yet nothing seems to have made it anywhere 'real' - must have been a ripple in the quantum universe. Anyway, I'm just going to leave those files where they are for now.
No, I'm no programmer!

Don't confuse us, we haven't had coffee since this morning.

well it ran all day - all day - then locked upW

doomed.

a reboot showed no trace of any copying; the root directory being copied from, digital_2010, was no where to be found on any of my drives. I watched the files get copied endlessly in the window, and yet nothing seems to have made it anywhere 'real' - must have been a ripple in the quantum universe.

Is the temp directory in a quantum universe? (I thought everything was, but that is beside the point.)

You'll always have that with the current versions of Windows. You'll have files that have some attribute set or whatever, and Windows is gonna make sure you want to do this (why with copying is beyond me). At least the entire op doesn't fail for the want of one file being locked in 7 (and maybe Vista as well).

But I'd never trust Windows to copy anything large. Try TeraCopy or similar. I'd also have a look at the one problem file of which you are aware and make it not a problem if it is something that might crash any file operation.

WHY can't a computer

Don't blame teh hardwares.

a 6.4 GB folder to be copied to an external drive

What sort of external drive, connected by what method? Hardware limitations may show in speed here.

you can build in overrides when doing it on the command line... copy /y ...

but i would recommend Robocopy (free command line utility from microsoft) which has a lot more options

if you insist on gui there's a gui to control robocopy somewhere I'm fairly sure...

personally if I'm being somewhat lazy i'll leave my keyboard with the "Y" button pressed down so it just hits "Y" when windows prompts... a stapler weighing down a pen or something that's pushing the key down works well.