In this blog I’m revisiting Microsoft’s Robocopy with using the “/XD” flag for excluding certain directories.
We are in the process of migrating about 200TB of data from one file cluster to another due to the underlying storage also changing. So robocopy has been our best friend for quite some time when you have to move these large datasets and retain things like Microsoft ACLs.
This particular command will copy from <source> to <destination> with the following options:
robocopy \\uncsource Y:\LocalDest /TEE /MIR /copyall /zb /w:1 /r:2 /xo /MT:16 /XD "?????1" "?????3" "?????5" "?????7" "?????9"/TEE: Writes the status output to the console window
/MIR: Mirrors directory tree (adds and deletes based on source data)
/copyall: Copies all file information
/zb: Copies files in restartable mode
/w:1: Specifies wait time between retries in seconds (1 second in this example)
/r:2: Specifies the number of retries on failed copies (2 retries in this example)
/xo: Excludes older files
/MT:16: Creates multi-threaded copies with n threads, must be between 1 and 128, default is 8.
/XD: Exclude directories
Directories are listed after XD in quotes and wildcards can be specified. A question mark (?) can be used for any character and an asterisk (*) can be used to fill in anything else.
For example if you wanted to exclude any directories that started with “ADM”, you could use:
/XD "ADM*"For example if you wanted to exclude any directories that start with anything and have a 1, 3, 5, 7, or 9 in them:
/XD "*1" "*3" "*5" "*7" "*9"The original first example above (copied again below this paragraph) is saying there can be any character for the first five characters and then if the last character is a 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 than exclude it and do not copy it.
robocopy \\uncsource Y:\LocalDest /TEE /MIR /copyall /zb /w:1 /r:2 /xo /MT:16 /XD "?????1" "?????3" "?????5" "?????7" "?????9"**NOTE** If you don’t want directories in directories to get skipped with the same wildcards specify a full path prior to the wildcards.
/XD “C:\Temp\?????1”