Hi, On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 7:45 PM, Karen Lewellen <klewel...@shellworld.net> wrote: > > I did just join the xxcopy yahoo group, so I can learn if that has any > advantages to using xcopy.
Okay, but I'm not sure they support the DOS version anymore. Their current .ZIP only has 32-bit and 64-bit PE / PE+ (Windows) binaries. Since you insist on DOS, that may be a deal breaker! > Any reason why I cannot just do > xcopy source drive target drive / all the desired switches? Well, I already mentioned a few things to consider: license, bugs, speed, LFN support, etc. BTW, I didn't think about timestamps, but if that's important to you (and that is indeed sometimes relevant), you may wish to use a tool that supports saving it (mtime? atime?). I'm honestly not sure if XCOPY (esp. MS) saves them correctly. Even for *nix, you usually have to use "cp -p" to preserve the metadata (or whatever you call it). For normal use, just the raw data is all that's important, but sometimes boring things like filenames and timestamps can mess things up, and not all things are FAT32 (+ access time) friendly. If you just want a raw full backup, it probably isn't too hard, just use something like *nix "dd". However, I suspect that that's too low-level, and even "xcopy" might be too naive. But it depends on your needs. You've gotten some good suggestions from others here, but you should still be careful before wiping anything. Make sure your backups are correct and 100% identical before doing any huge changes to the original data. P.S. At one time (Vista?), MS was calling XCOPY "deprecated" in lieu of "ROBOCOPY" (which of course doesn't have a DOS equivalent). No idea what's "better" about it, but just FYI. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
