Side-by-side copy using xcopy

Question

I need to copy multiple directories from one place to another. So there will be several xcopy statements, one after the other.

The number of files in each folder is huge. Is there any way I can run these xcopy statements in parallel? One option I can think of is to invoke each xcopy in a separate batch file and invoke these batch files using @start instead of @call .

Is there any other alternative?

Answer 1

You can start xcopy directly, for example start xcopy [parameters] . This allows you to run many xcopy instances in parallel.

By the way: Have you tried robocopy? It is included in all recent versions of Windows and offers more features (and sometimes performance) than xcopy.

But in general, copying multiple directories in parallel is slower (at least when you copy from disk to another disk) because it will cause the original disk to search between parallel copy jobs instead of reading files sequentially.