My colleague Keith Robertson sent out an e-mail this morning which highlighted the release of a Microsoft tool that was formerly for internal use only – RichCopy. There’s more information in Joshua Hoffman’s article in the April 2009 edition of TechNet magazine but think of it as RoboCopy on steroids:

“RichCopy is a multi-threaded robust utility to copy files between locations. Importantly, it is multi-threaded and can recover from broken links and file locks etc. It also supports file masks – making it great for copying a users directories – but not their MP3 and movie collection…”

I can see that this could work well on a LAN but, for those looking to move large files across a WAN (or even t’Internet… where the tubes may be a little blocked at times), it may be worth taking a look at using BITS for scheduled transfers, together with Mads Klinkby’s BITSync tool.