Copying files with Copy-Item or robocopy

Question

I got the following problem. I have a folder C:\Users\Username. In that folder you can find folders like "Documents", "Favorites" etc.

What im trying to do is including only some of the folder to copy.

I was playing arround with Robocopy XD to exclude some folder but that is not acceptable cuz i cant know all the folder that may be there.

Then i tried Get-ChildItem -include <some dir>. Now i want to copy only the listed folders. But robocopy copies only the content of the folder and not the folder itself. Are there any other solutions for this problem.

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 11 '19 at 09:58

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First : don't forget to use -recurse on Get-ChildItem to grab all the structure in the object.
Then on robocopy:

You need /s to include non-empty subdirectories and /e to include the all the subdirs
/b and /purge is nice when you are doing backups - greatly increased speed . be careful with purge though
/xd <Directory>[ ...] Excludes directories that match the specified names and paths. (or you can include just a list of the desired subdirs)

I use something like this:

$source = 'C:\hold\first test'
$destination = 'C:\hold\second test'
$robocopyOptions = @('/NJH', '/NJS')
$fileList = 'test.txt'
Start robocopy -args "$source $destination $fileList $robocopyOptions"

see this question: Powershell with Robocopy (or how the #$(*& do I pass arguments right?)

Also the log option saved my life a couple of times.

For all the parameters see robocopy docs

edited Apr 11 '19 at 09:58

barbsan

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answered Apr 11 '19 at 09:46

TudorIftimie

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thank you for the edit ! It is my first try to answer a question - I will improve my style :) – TudorIftimie Apr 11 '19 at 10:00
when it comes to `Start robocopy -args "$source $destination $fileList $robocopyOptions"` a cmd shows for like a milisecond and exits again and nothing happened. Maybe this is also a usefull info, i'm using it in a powershell script. – seyo -IV Apr 11 '19 at 10:14
you can use `-NoNewWindow -PassThru -Wait` for the window as recommended in the quoted link. But I prefer using logs with a timestamp in the name for each run. – TudorIftimie Apr 11 '19 at 10:35
I think i know the problem now. It works only with files not folders – seyo -IV Apr 11 '19 at 10:57

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 11 '19 at 11:17

0

I have just found out you can do Copy-Item -Path $path"\Desktop" -Destination $newdir -Recurse and it will copy the Desktop folder with its content.

answered Apr 11 '19 at 11:17

seyo -IV

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Copying files with Copy-Item or robocopy

2 Answers2