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Windows Server 2008 provides at least three different command line utilities for copying files. The familiar COPY and XCOPY commands have been around since the early DOS days. And ROBOCOPY, a more robust and feature-rich tool, began shipping with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. These tools work just fine in most cases. But all three suffer from a fatal flaw when you’re trying to copy a file that’s larger than available memory.

Manifestation of the Problem

Our main servers are quad-core machines with 32 gigabytes of RAM, running the 64 bit version of Windows Server 2008. Our custom format repository file is about 90 gigabytes in size. That’s after compression. In addition to daily backups, I periodically need to copy that file to another computer. And that’s where the problems start. Read more »