Need utility to copy folder to many USB Keys

TechLarry

TechLarry

RIP [H] Brother - June 1, 2022
Joined
Aug 9, 2005
Messages
30,481
About once a quarter I have to prep 50 or so USB Thumb Drives. They are bootable and used to install corporate images.

The bootable part is taken care of. Once that's done, it doesn't need to be re-done.

However, manually copying an 8gb image, one at a time, is getting quite tiresome.

I need a utility that will take the contents of a folder on the hard drive (which contains the image) and will copy it to however many USB Thumb Drives I have attached to the machine automatically.

I could set up 8 keys to load at a time with this.

I have tried a program called "Rapid Copy". In essence, it does what I want but I've found it to be quite buggy, and it does not show any sort of status bar when it's doing the copies. It's hard to know what's done and what isn't.

The utility will be executed on a Windows 7 x64 machine.

In short, the utility needs to:

1. Allow me to select the mounted drives to include in the copy operation.
2. Allow me to enable a check box (or option) that erases the USB key prior to the copy.
3. Once the options are set, it would copy the image to all of the keys without intervention.
4. Have some sort of progress indication so I know what's going on.

EDIT: The image is just a bunch of files, much like you would use when creating a bootable Windows 7 Install Key.

Thanks :)
 
Last edited:
You can do this with FastCopy. You can run multiple instances, one for each destination drive. When you have more than two open and execute one to start copying, a button will appear on the other instances "Start at once" if you press execute, otherwise they will continue copying in sequence. There is also a x64 version available and it requires no installation. I always carry a copy on my flash drives.

67094987.png


71764314.png
 
Last edited:
The only thing I don't see is the erase function. Am I missing it?

Nighted said:
You can do this with FastCopy. You can run multiple instances, one for each destination drive. When you have more than two open and execute one to start copying, a button will appear on the other instances "Start at once" if you press execute, otherwise they will continue copying in sequence. There is also a x64 version available and it requires no installation. I always carry a copy on my flash drives.

67094987.png


71764314.png
Click to expand...
 
Write a script? Though admittedly Windows gives very poor access to information about attached drives in the shell, it's still not too hard.

Also you will probably have I/O bottlenecking with 8 reasonable speed USB drives going at once. 2 or 3 at a time might be overall faster, depending on how well the OS uses its caches.
 
I'm trying to avoid manual methods like scripting. There are several others that have to do the same thing once I get this worked out.
 
TechLarry said:
The only thing I don't see is the erase function. Am I missing it?
Click to expand...

Erase? Not sure what you mean. Best I can suggest is set FastCopy to overwrite if there is data on the flash drives and create a post process command to clean up the original data once complete. I don't see how you'd want that though as you need to plug in more drives to create more copies.
 
TechLarry said:
I'm trying to avoid manual methods like scripting. There are several others that have to do the same thing once I get this worked out.
Click to expand...

The whole point of a script is automation. Write it once, give it to your other users.
 
I want it to erase the targets prior to the new data copy.

Keep in mind guys, everyone will have a different config than mine. Different numbers of USB ports, different numbers of keys connected. That's why I want to avoid scripting. I don't want them to have to edit the scripts. Not everyone has the same skill levels with this stuff... Some have NONE!

Nighted said:
Erase? Not sure what you mean. Best I can suggest is set FastCopy to overwrite if there is data on the flash drives and create a post process command to clean up the original data once complete. I don't see how you'd want that though as you need to plug in more drives to create more copies.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
TechLarry said:
Keep in mind guys, everyone will have a different config than mine. Different numbers of USB ports, different numbers of keys connected. That's why I want to avoid scripting. I don't want them to have to edit the scripts. Not everyone has the same skill levels with this stuff... Some have NONE!
Click to expand...

It's not really easy to discover with the Windows built-in tools, but there are ways to programatically find this information. Then you could just confirm with the user before doing anything. You're right that it's probably somewhat more error prone that popping up a dialog of what USB ports are there and getting all clicky with it, but I'm not sure you'll find a prefab solution that does everything you want.
 
There are machines that will copy USB keys, though they are VERY pricy (you could buy a whole fleet of company cars for one), but it's worth bringing up, maybe they'll actually be willing to buy one, or maybe there are less expensive ones out there.
 
As an alternative to the pricey hardware, there is software that can do the job pretty well with some standard USB hubs, like USB duplicator now. I'm sure there's more if you google, but I haven't come across free software for this.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top