Copying many small files in Vista

H

HOCP4ME

2[H]4U
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Jul 1, 2005
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I'm having a problem copying many small files to a USB flash drive. Almost every day, I must copy a 500MB Eclipse workspace to and from a USB drive. The problem is, this 500MB is split into over 30,000 individual files (which I think is stupid BTW; Eclipse's designers apparently do not understand the concept of a file system).

As Vista is optimized for large file transfers rather than small ones, this is a big problem. Copying the 500MB workspace to a USB drive takes over twenty minutes with an average transfer rate of less than 1MB/sec. On the other hand, if I put the files into a WinRAR uncompressed archive and copy that (which Vista recognizes as one big file), it take thirty seconds at 30MB/sec. Of course, extracting the files on the other end still takes twenty minutes.

I know Vista is optimized to copy large files, and I think that was a good idea; everything Windows-based has used large files for a while now. Eclipse is not Windows-based (obviously), however, so this is causing me a major inconvenience. Is there a way to tweak the Vista copy engine to work better with small files instead of large files? Some sort of registry options or something?

Yes, I've tried setting "optimize for performance" on the USB drive. All that did was make the estimated time on the copy horribly inaccurate, and now I have to use the "safely remove hardware" thing again.

Thanks.
 
Can you use synctoy or a similar tool just to update the changed files on a daily basis? It should be much better then copying the entire thing back and forth.
 
darkpaw said:
Can you use synctoy or a similar tool just to update the changed files on a daily basis? It should be much better then copying the entire thing back and forth.
Click to expand...

Second this suggestion of syncing rather than 1:1. I also wonder if this b.s. is fixed in Win7, but I don't want to derail this thread heh.
 
I haven't a clue what an Eclipse workspace is, but would you be able to store it on a Truecrypt file-hosted volume? Then all you'd need to do is copy the single large container file.

Of course you'd also need Truecrypt installed at the other end, but you'd have the added bonus of your data being encrypted and secure (if it matters) in the event that your USB drive was lost or stolen...
 
its not really a vista issue, you get the same behavior with many small files on a usb stick with any os that i have used. Its easier to just zip it up (no-compression/store only for extra speed in "compression"/"decompression")
 
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