Copying data between Windows servers

Copying data between Windows  servers

If you have a large amount of data to copy from server to server, such as in the case of a server migration, there is a command line program you can use called robocopy which is much more reliable than your usual copy and paste and will also allow you to keep a log of the copy operation to make sure everything went ok. This comes inbuilt with windows and is run as below.

First off, Mount the destination you want to copy to as a network drive on the source server

Open a command prompt, running as administrator (right click - run as admin)

Run the command below, substituting E for the drive letter you are copying from and Z for the letter you have mounted the network drive to.

robocopy "E:\Path\To\Source\Files" "Z:\Path\To\Network\Drive\Destination" /mir /sec /log:"C:\copylog.txt
 
This will do a command line copy of the data in the E drive location to the Z drive location.  This will also log everything it is doing to the file C:\copylog.txt