Jon Galloway

Here here! You've got my vote.

Abort, Retry, Cancel?

Do you have a proposed GUI/user story? I suppose a dialog similar to Jeff's <em>Abort, Retry, Cancel</em> wouldn't be too bad...

Here's why it will never come about.

Who's responsibility is it? Is it the responsibility of the Network subsystem to not immediately terminate the network connection until a specified period has ended? Or is it the responsibility of the file system to not abort a file copy until a specified time period.

What are the ramifications of a timeout in either case?

I know!  I was pretty excited to see all sorts of new features in Vista. I dreamed of all the the wondorful goodies that would be in the "sixth major release of an operating system", only to find a beautiful UI slapped on the same old functionality.

Oh well. There is always 2010...

I agree.  I usually cite the lack of improvement in file or network operations as one of my biggest frustrations with Vista.  

Scott,

It is the responsibility of explorer to resume a file copy.  Simply merge features of Robocopy into explorer's codebase.

I imagine that with a bit of engineering, you could make this transparent to the user and 100% backwords compatible.

Both products are owned by Microsoft so it doesn't seem like such a hard problem to solve afterall.

Actually you CAN do restartable file copies, using robocopy (comes with rktools).  Pass the "/z" flag and your done.

I've actually gotten into the habbit of using robocopy because I never have to sit there and wait for windows to calculate folder counts just to show me a progress bar.

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It is really amazing that nothing has been done to "fix" this.

Not only you cannot restart, but if your target is full, it crashes, you cannot "pause" the operation if you need to disconnect the net, etc..

When copying large sets of data it gives some pain. I usually zip lot of things before starting copy to make it a little faster, and if it breaks, well, I can restart the copy of a sinlge file instead. not needing to diff an whole filestructure.

Try Terracopy.  It's free, and hooks into Explorer to provide just this functionality.  No, I'm not an employee.  :o)

Last September, I asked why aren't Windows file copies restartable ? It's a huge productivity killer

how do you hook terracopy into internet explorer so that when you click on a link to copy (ie the run/save option) you can restart the copy in the event of connection failure?

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