Copies NTFS Permissions / Auditing Information / Owner Information: EMCopy and RoboCopy will both do this, but again, EMCopy just mops the floor with RoboCopy when running it side by side.

Overall, EMCopy screams at doing a backup or mirroring a directory, because of the way it traverses the folders, which is in a non-linear manner.

Performing Backups or Mirror Directories: EMCopy doesn't have a '/MIR' command, however you can use two commands that will only copy files that are newer on the source, and also to delete files that no longer exist on source.

For smaller files it works better to have more threads, but it's important that the utility pre-allocates the files, to reduce fragmentation. copying a lot of larger files can benefit from fewer threads. There are down sides to multithreading though, e.g. Comparing EMCopy to RoboCopy with the same number of threads, EMCopy is 25-35% faster. RoboCopy does support 128 threads on new versions of Windows 2008R2 and above.

Multithreading: EMCopy supports up to 256 threads.I'll just give you a few quick points of what works better with EMCopy. It is a free data migration tool, CLI only, and has a lot of features that just seem to work better than RoboCopy. What I have found on a long quest of trial and error is a utility called 'EMCopy' from EMC. However, I've gotten to the point where RoboCopy is just not fast enough. First off, I love RoboCopy, I've used it for over a decade now, and I have no issues with it. As you can see in the example below permissions get cloned from to. So I came up with a simple perl script which can be ran on Isilon to clone permissions easily and quickly. You can use setfacp/getfacl, but it’s kludgy and deprecated in favor of ls/chmod. What I needed was really simple, just to clone permissions (both unix and windows) from one file to another. If you haven’t picked it up by now, i’m a command line guy with a strong unix background – so I don’t like using the windows GUI to control SMB permissions. This is even further complicated using systems which allow for work Windows and Unix shares – Such as an EMC Isilon. One of the most annoying managements tasks of a Network Attached Storage is managing permissions for Windows files.

Emcopy commands