Windows File Managing: Copying and Deleting Files

Windows File Explorer isn’t great at dealing with large files

Windows File Explorer is a decent enough way to see a high level view of the contents of a directory, but if you’ve ever kept around too many large files, had to copy those files from one disk to another, or ever ran ‘npm install’, you are going to have a bad time.

It’s a bit tough to copy or delete files when dealing with either a large amount of files (independent of size of files) or any set of of large files using Windows File explorer. So don’t.

Copying files with Robocopy:

Heavily based on this Stack Overflow post, do the following in powershell:

You may have multiple copies of robocopy installed on your machine, and one of them may not support the ‘/mt’ flag mentioned above. Make sure to use the copy of robocopy located on your system32 directory. Usually that entails running the command like so

Recursively delete a directory with rmdir:

Open up ‘cmd’ ( this command works differently in powershell, I’m sure there is a way to get it to work, but this works well enough)