OK, so not everyone uses Robocopy on a regular basis, but I sure do! I am super excited about Windows 7′s version of Robocopy. Robocopy was created by Mark Russinovich, and was included in a whole suite of free windows tools called Sysinternal Tools. Well, Mark works for Microsoft now, and has continued his development of his tools, including robocopy. Basically, robocopy is a command line tool that copies/moves files from one location to another. While this seems to be a common task (copy/cut/paste) for most users, sometimes administrators need to tweak the copy process.
Robocopy has a plethora of options for administrators to use, some used more often than others, but all prove priceless at one time or another. To list all the options for robocopy, just use the /? switch to list all available switches.
OK, on to Multi-threaded file copy! Up until now, robocopy copied one file at a time. Most of the time, that was OK, but it would be really nice to do it faster. Windows 7 version of robocopy includes the /MT switch. The default is 8, so if you use the switch, it will copy 8 files at a time. I did a few tests, and here are my results:
I copied a folder from my hard drive to a mapped drive on a server, over a Gigabit network. The folder was 35MB, and had 1140 files it it.
Without /MT switch: (robocopy Source Destination/E)
- Directories: 166
- Files: 1140
- Size: 35.71MB
- Time: 03:55
With /MT:8 switch: (robocopy Source Destination/E /MT:
- Directories: 166
- Files: 1140
- Size: 35.71MB
- Time: 52 seconds
Needless to say, using the multi-thread switch with robocopy is much faster! Unfortunately, the Windows 7 Version of robocopy does NOT work on any previous version of windows. Bummer! Anyway, Win7 is a great OS so far, so this is just another added bonus of buying that upgrade! 
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Hi there. I love robocopy, i have since i found it on sys internals. I first used it when i was tasked with copying a 200gb SQL server database over to another server, Robocopy was perfect because of the verified copies! I was delighted when it was included in windows 7 and over the moon when i heard it was multithreaded. One quibble i have is that the feedback when running MT isnt great. It IS actually copying everything over, so, if running /MT:4, it is copying the 4 files, it just doesnt tell you about them on the command line. This confused me to begin with, but who cares, as long as it copies!
We ran some tests comparing Robocopy with and without the /MT (multithread) option with local disk, 1GbE network and 10GbE network. We tested a variety of numbers and sizes of files. I gave a presentation at our local user group meeting, and the presentation is available at http://www.demartek.com/Demartek_Presenting_RMWTUG_March_2011-03.html. The /MT option provides improved performance and in some cases, significantly improved performance.
For what it is worth, it does appear that the version of robocopy included in Windows 7 does run on Windows 2008 R2. –YMMV