Preparation time before copying files

[Robert Borkowski]

Hi,

I am accessing many files on a very slow SMB server. Unfortunately, copying large directory trees takes a lot of initial "preparation" time. I believe TC is creating a list of files to be copied by reading the entire directory structure ahead (and counting the total size). This can literally take hours to complete, when dealing with 100k-1M files nested in thousands of subdirectories. This happens regardless of foreground or background copy mode.

Now, I only need to copy changes between the updated tree and the old tree. When choosing "overwrite all older," it seems to me that the directory structure needs to be traversed twice: once during preparation and the second time when actually copying files (in order to check their timestamps perhaps). It could be that the same situation is in case I "skip existing files" (but I didn't test it that way so I don't know). On a slow connection, traversing the tree twice amounts to a lot of time.

My question is whether there is a possibility to skip this initial preparation step, and copy files as the tree is discovered?

My other wish/suggestion would be to give user some info, as to what exactly TC is doing. Currently, the copy progress bar in this preparation step stays at 0%, there is also no textual feedback of what is it doing, and it may stay like that for hours. Often I am simply not sure if TC froze or whether it's a matter of a slow network.

Thanks!

[Hacker]

Robert Borkowski,
Yes, press Esc for a short time during the counting.
You can also turn off the counting in the options, under Operation, look for "Calculate space" near the bottom.

HTH
Roman

[Dalai]

When TC starts counting files in the copy dialog, press ESC once to tell TC to stop counting and start copying files. Note that TC won't show any file count and volume during copy because this information is not available (or incomplete) when the count process is aborted.

Regards
Dalai