Much to my surprise, I have been relying heavily on a very old Windows app, Robocopy, at work the past few days. Part of the work I need to do this week involves moving very large files to and from a network share over a very slow VPN connection. Those file transfers were hosing my file manager, DoubleCommander, so I started doing them from Windows Terminal via Robocopy. It’s a tool I haven’t really used in about 20 years, when I wrote batch jobs to deploy my software or move data files around, but it still works.

It defaults to copying folders, but it is easy to configure the command to move individual files or groups of files. I love how it provides a summary of what it is going to do, and provides a completion percentage as it copies or moves each file.

Tonight, I learned of a feature that I should have been using the whole time: the /compress flag. It will request network compression during the file transfer, if it is available. I will try that tomorrow to see if it speeds up those enormous file transfers I have been doing.