Where's my "No to All" button?

February 22, 2008 4:18 AM

I've been a Windows user since 3.1; I'm comfortable with it, I know enough keyboard shortcuts to do without a mouse. Basically, I'm fluent. So why, when copying a large number of files(moving my music collection to a different external hard drive) can't I figure out how to tell Windows to copy only the new files, and skip the files already on the target drive?

I already had a music folder on the target drive, and when I drag my 'real' music file to the target drive, it says,"drive already contains a music folder"or some such. I have options such as 'Yes', 'No', and 'Yes to All', but not "No to All". So my only option is to tell it to overwrite every file already there, which would be so much faster if I could tell it to only copy files not there. I know I'm missing something obvious, but I've been looking on & off for 20-some years now.

Please somebody make me feel stupid by showing me what I'm missing. I won't be too hurt; I've showed Alt+Tab to many adults that were wowed.

posted by pipesplus to computers & internet (21 comments total)

What you need is SyncToy or something similar.
posted by chrisamiller at 4:21 AM on February 22

I use a Mac at home so I can't confirm this, but I think I've heard that shift-clicking the "No" button on the "Are you sure you want to overwrite the existing file?" dialog meant "No to all".
posted by letourneau at 4:26 AM on February 22 [1 favorite]

SHIFT + NO seemed to work for me. Something ironic about a MAC user teaching fluent Windows users that I don't care for. /sarc
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 4:29 AM on February 22

letourneau and (in preview) B(oYo)BIES are right. It was covered some years ago at Lifehacker linking to this Windows Explorer Hacks article.
posted by Memo at 4:30 AM on February 22

Get yourself a copy of Xplorer2 Lite and if you enjoy that consider coughing up $30 for the Pro version. It's the awesomest.

One click options for what you were talking about above.
posted by unixrat at 4:35 AM on February 22

xcopy c:\mymusic\*.* e:\hermusic\ /U
posted by mattoxic at 4:40 AM on February 22

Not for nothing, but Vista offers you the option when you do a file operation with the "merge" option. I'm guessing you're not using Vista, and my advice is therefore useless.
posted by disillusioned at 4:43 AM on February 22

Sorry, I lie

try /Y

or xcopy /? for all options
posted by mattoxic at 4:43 AM on February 22

xcopy /Y /D /S /I c:\from\* c:\to\*

and look at xcopy /?
for /D:m-d-y (copy newer than date)
and /EXCLUDE:listfile
to not copy stuff you do not want copied.

/Y - no prompts
/D - only copy newer and missing files
/S - create subdirectories as needed
/I - in case the destination directory does not already exist

and if you want a log, redirect output:

xcopy /Y /D /S /I c:\from\* c:\to\* >my.log
posted by hexatron at 5:34 AM on February 22 [1 favorite]

Try Teracopy.
posted by iceman7 at 5:41 AM on February 22

Heck, I just use SyncToy.

On the other hand, obnoxious as the lack of a "No to all" button might be, the default merging behavior on Windows is in my mind much more intuitive than the Mac behavior of "if folder exists, delete folder, then replace instead of just combining contents" thing that I discovered by accident (and lost some relatively unimportant files as a result).
posted by caution live frogs at 6:03 AM on February 22 [1 favorite]

robocopy /copyall /b /sec /mir /r:0 /w:0

will do it and this is by far the neatest way I've ever found. Google for robocopy, its very powerful and i swear its faster than any GUI based copier.

You can run this as many times as you like, it will only update and copy new files, and replicate deletions.

I use this to back up hundreds of folders daily and monthly to my spare hard drives.
posted by daveyt at 6:15 AM on February 22 [1 favorite]

<hijack>
okay, how do you do this on a Mac? (without a third-party utility)
</hijack>
posted by mpls2 at 6:15 AM on February 22

rsync or an automator action that syncs folders if you're not a fan of the command line.

posted by Brian Puccio at 6:32 AM on February 22

Nting "robocopy". Excellent free Microsoft tool. And they don't have many excellent tools imho. That's why it's hidden and virtually unknown except by system administrators. I use it to mirror my music and pictures to my Amazon S3 space (with the free s3drive tool). Put the command line with appropriate options in a batch file and click on it when you need to sync. Or set up a job with the windows scheduler.
posted by Nightwind at 6:54 AM on February 22

hex has it. save that as a .bat file, and you're good to go. I use that exact command to backup my documents every day.
posted by lohmannn at 7:42 AM on February 22

because, windows sucks for this. you came in too late. if you had learned DOS first then you would be as fluent as hexatron. this is a task for DOS, not windows, which really is a shame for windows. if you forget the syntax just type xcopy /? for help.
posted by caddis at 8:13 AM on February 22

mpls2 - you don't, near as I can tell. Manually syncing or using another utility like rsync or chronosync or something is the only way I have found to do this on a Mac.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:00 AM on February 22

Obligatory Total Commander link.
posted by qvtqht at 3:22 PM on February 22

Robocopy handles long pathnames better than xcopy, which has a 255-character pathname length limit. I found this out the hard way when attempting to use xcopy to back up a school server - when a kid saves a Word document without specifying a filename, Word makes up its own name using as much text from the first paragraph as it can wedge in, and xcopy would regularly stop dead on encountering such a file.
posted by flabdablet at 6:03 AM on February 25

For what it's worth, robocopy supersedes xcopy on Vista and Windows Server 2008. I'd recommend learning the robocopy syntax even if you already know xcopy.
posted by me & my monkey at 9:59 AM on February 25