Sunday, January 28, 2007

NetFileCopy: when slow copying is faster


It seems counter-intuitive: to get files to copy faster you need to copy them slower. Welcome to the world of the Virtual Private Network (VPN) that uses internet connections between computers.
Because the performance of the connection can be very erratic, even over an ADSL line, the usual "copy" command in a batch file can give unreliable results. So I wrote "NetFileCopy", a Visual Basic utility that copies files in smaller chunks: in this case 2048 bytes at a time.
The picture shows NetFileCopy in action, and the network traffic it encountered.
A progress bar and elapsed time indicator help the user to know how the copying is progressing, and if the file copy encounters an error the partial file is deleted, something that the normal "copy" command doesn't always do. This is a free utility, and will be made available once some features are added and the error handling improved.

1 comment:

ntxpla said...

I am in need of such an app - but I need it taken one step further.

I would like to see a sleep(x) option that I can place in between each chunk copied, and also between the files themselves.

Thanks!