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:
Robocopy.exe /E /R:3 /W:10 /FP /MT:25 /V "<SOURCE_DIRECTORY>" "<TARGET_DIRECTORY>" |
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
C:\Windows\System32\Robocopy.exe /E /R:3 /W:10 /FP /MT:25 /V "<SOURCE_DIRECTORY>" "<TARGET_DIRECTORY>" |
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)
rmdir /s /q <DIRECTORY_TO_DELETE> |