RoboCopy Terminates XCopy!

I've just been adding some more automation sprinkles to our website deployment strategy. I now have 12 white-labelled sites that need publishing at least once a day. Now, I know there'll be some fully automated solutions out there but, hey, this works for us.

I was building a little batch file to deploy the extracted files once cited on the server. OK, so let's re-acquaint myself with XCopy's parameters.

"Note: Xcopy is now deprecated, please use Robocopy."

WTF. What's Robocopy!?

Seems as though I've missed a few of the Microsoft emails about this 'new' feature of Windows. It used to be available as a Resource download but is a standard component from Windows XP onwards.

So, what can it do? Well, after a cursory glance, pretty much anything. There's a glut of parameters covering the following sections: Copy, File Selection, Retry, Logging, Job. Here's a couple that stood out as extremely useful...

• /E :: copy subdirectories, including Empty ones.
• /LEV:n :: only copy the top n LEVels of the source directory tree.
• /Z :: copy files in restartable mode (if the connection is interrupted it will continue when next available!).
• /PURGE :: delete dest files/dirs that no longer exist in the source.
• /MIR :: MIRror a directory tree (equivalent to /E plus /PURGE

I'm well aware that I may very well be the only guy on this sphere who isn't aware of this command line tool; but I think this was worth noting anyway.