Have you ever been frustrated copying or moving files in Windows? It seems to take forever and seems to slow the system down to a crawl. Sometimes you want to pause the copying or moving of files but in Windows your only option is to cancel the copy and the result is only a partial copy of the files and without taking the time to look through the files or folder, there’s no simple way of determining how far the copy got. Or maybe you’re copying off a dying drive and the system consistently fails on multiple files while copying.  Well there’s a simple program that overcomes the limitations of the Windows default file copy/move. The program is called TeraCopy by Code Sector. The link to the program is below.

http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

Just download and install the program. There’s one option that you should be aware of during the installation. You will be prompted if you would like to “Use TeraCopy as the default copy handler”. If you would still like to keep the Windows copy / move feature, I would suggest against selecting this option. This is especially so to make sure that there is no incompatibilities with other programs you may have installed in your system.

So here’s a quick guide on how to copy/ move files. In this example, I will be moving a 1.79GB folder to a completely different hard drive. The process is the same for copying files

Simply, right click on the file or folder you wish to copy or move and from the context menu, select ‘TeraCopy’. Once you’ve done so, the following screen should appear. If the bottom part of the menu does not appear, just click the ‘More’ button.

Click the appropriate option of either ‘Copy To’ or ‘Move To’. The following screen will appear.

Select the directory to where you would like to move the files to and click ‘OK’. The file copy or move should start.

You’ll notice you may interrupt the file action by clicking ‘Pause’.

When copying a small number of files, the process is not faster by much compared to the Windows copy/move function but when you’re moving a large number of files, this program can save you a lot of time and headache. Especially because it reports back a list of files it was unable to copy and passed over rather than stopping the whole copy process.

So here’s a summary of the features of the program right from the developer’s website:

  • Copy files faster. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.
  • Pause and resume file transfers. Pause copy process at any time to free up system resources and continue with a single click.
  • Error recovery. In case of copy error, TeraCopy will try several times and in the worse case just skips the file, not terminating the entire transfer.
  • Interactive file list. TeraCopy shows failed file transfers and lets you fix the problem and recopy only problem files.
  • Shell integration. TeraCopy can completely replace Explorer copy and move functions, allowing you work with files as usual.
  • Full Unicode support.

For $14.95 € or about $24.00 you can get the Pro version which gives you the added features below:

  • Select files with the same extension/same folder
  • Remove selected files from the copy queue
  • Get free updates and priority support
  • More features coming soon!