People have been asking me for years in my presentations what that icon on my desktop called “RichCopy” was. I would of course tell them all about it. That was always followed by a request for the utility. Well, it only took nine years to fulfill that request, but it’s finally here.
I didn’t even know we were going to release it, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it prominently displayed right at the top of the April TechNet Magazine. The cover pic on the website is too small for you to see the box next to the TechNet name, but fear not. Head on over to the column from Joshua Hoffman called, “Utility Spotlight: RichCopy”
Joshua gives you some of the background, history, and other information in the column. But you’ll want to head right to the download link and grab one of my favorite utilities. Here’s a screenshot of this bad boy in action. In the job below, I am uploading the content for the Interop Road Show to a server in Seattle. RichCopy has ten upload threads going and as you can see, I am uploading the very beginning of the self extracting archive.
This brings me to an important point. If you are supplying people a big fat .ISO image or zip file, please rethink your strategy. WinRAR from RARLabs is a great archive utility and when combined with a tool like RichCopy, it’s a match made in heaven. With WinRAR, I took the entire set of content and archived it into 100MB chunks. People that use multi threaded download tools like RichCopy are going to love me for that.
My team standard for FTP is the wonderful FileZilla. Like RichCopy, FileZilla is also multi threaded. I have never used RichCopy for FTP because until the public release, you were required to be connected to our corporate AD forest to use it. And the last thing I want is a FTP client that is running across the VPN connection. That has all changed now, so I need to run some tests with both of them and see if there’s a clear winner. Today I am using RichCopy for SMB and FileZilla for FTP. Using a single util for both may make more sense now.
Get RichCopy @ http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/d/0/fd05def7-68a1-4f71-8546-25c359cc0842/HoffmanUtilitySpotlight2009_04.exe.