batch/bat to copy folder and content at once - windows

Question

I'm writing a batch script that does a copy. I want to script it to copy an entire folder. When I want to copy a single file, I do this
copy %~dp0file.txt file.txt
If I have a folder with this structure, is there a command to copy this entire folder with its contents all at once while preserving the exact structure.
mainfolder/
file1.txt
file2.txt
insidefolder/
file3.txt
file4.txt
file5.txt

Answer 1

if you have xcopy, you can use the /E param, which will copy directories and subdirectories and the files within them, including maintaining the directory structure for empty directories
xcopy [source] [destination] /E

Answer 2

The old way:
xcopy [source] [destination] /E
xcopy is deprecated. Robocopy replaces Xcopy. It comes with Windows 8, 8.1 and 10.
robocopy [source] [destination] /E
robocopy has several advantages:
copy paths exceeding 259 characters
multithreaded copying
More details here.

Answer 3

I suspect that the xcopy command is the magic bullet you're looking for.
It can copy files, directories, and even entire drives while preserving the original directory hierarchy. There are also a handful of additional options available, compared to the basic copy command.
Check out the documentation here.
If your batch file only needs to run on Windows Vista or later, you can use robocopy instead, which is an even more powerful tool than xcopy, and is now built into the operating system. It's documentation is available here.

Answer 4

For Folder Copy You can Use
robocopy C:\Source D:\Destination /E
For File Copy
copy D:\Sourcefile.txt D:\backup\Destinationfile.txt /Y
Delete file in some folder last modify date more than some day
forfiles -p "D:\FolderPath" -s -m *.[Filetype eg-->.txt] -d -[Numberof dates] -c "cmd /c del #PATH"
And you can Shedule task in windows perform this task automatically in specific time.

Answer 5

I've been interested in the original
question here and related ones.
For an answer, this week I did some
experiments with XCOPY.
To help answer the original question, here
I post the results of my experiments.
I did the experiments on Windows 7 64 bit
Professional SP1 with the copy of XCOPY
that came with the operating system.
For the experiments, I wrote some code in
the scripting language Open Object Rexx
and the editor macro language Kexx with
the text editor KEdit.
XCOPY was called from the Rexx code. The
Kexx code edited the screen output of
XCOPY to focus on the crucial results.
The experiments all had to do with using
XCOPY to copy one directory with several
files and subdirectories.
The experiments consisted of 10 cases.
Each case adjusted the arguments to XCOPY
and called XCOPY once. All 10 cases were
attempting to do the same copying
operation.
Here are the main results:
(1) Of the 10 cases, only three did
copying. The other 7 cases right away,
just from processing the arguments to
XCOPY, gave error messages, e.g.,
Invalid path
Access denied
with no files copied.
Of the three cases that did copying, they
all did the same copying, that is, gave
the same results.
(2) If want to copy a directory X and all
the files and directories in directory X,
in the hierarchical file system tree
rooted at directory X, then apparently
XCOPY -- and this appears to be much of
the original question -- just will NOT do
that.
One consequence is that if using XCOPY to
copy directory X and its contents, then
CAN copy the contents but CANNOT copy the
directory X itself; thus, lose the
time-date stamp on directory X, its
archive bit, data on ownership,
attributes, etc.
Of course if directory X is a subdirectory
of directory Y, an XCOPY of Y will copy
all of the contents of directory Y WITH
directory X. So in this way can get a copy
of directory X. However, the copy of
directory X will have its time-date stamp
of the time of the run of XCOPY and NOT
the time-date stamp of the original
directory X.
This change in time-date stamps can be
awkward for a copy of a directory with a
lot of downloaded Web pages: The HTML
file of the Web page will have its
original time-date stamp, but the
corresponding subdirectory for files used
by the HTML file will have the time-date
stamp of the run of XCOPY. So, when
sorting the copy on time date stamps, all
the subdirectories, the HTML files and the
corresponding subdirectories, e.g.,
x.htm
x_files
can appear far apart in the sort on
time-date.
Hierarchical file systems go way back,
IIRC to Multics at MIT in 1969, and since
then lots of people have recognized the
two cases, given a directory X, (i) copy
directory X and all its contents and (ii)
copy all the contents of X but not
directory X itself. Well, if only from
the experiments, XCOPY does only (ii).
So, the results of the 10 cases are below.
For each case, in the results the first
three lines have the first three arguments
to XCOPY. So, the first line has the tree
name of the directory to be copied, the
'source'; the second line has the tree
name of the directory to get the copies,
the 'destination', and the third line has
the options for XCOPY. The remaining 1-2
lines have the results of the run of
XCOPY.
One big point about the options is that
options /X and /O result in result
Access denied
To see this, compare case 8 with the other
cases that were the same, did not have /X
and /O, but did copy.
These experiments have me better
understand XCOPY and contribute an answer
to the original question.
======= case 1 ==================
"k:\software\dir_time-date\"
"k:\software\xcopy002_test\xcopy002_test_dirs\output_sub_dir_1\"
options = /E /F /G /H /K /O /R /V /X /Y
Result: Invalid path
Result: 0 File(s) copied
======= case 2 ==================
"k:\software\dir_time-date\*"
"k:\software\xcopy002_test\xcopy002_test_dirs\output_sub_dir_2\"
options = /E /F /G /H /K /O /R /V /X /Y
Result: Access denied
Result: 0 File(s) copied
======= case 3 ==================
"k:\software\dir_time-date"
"k:\software\xcopy002_test\xcopy002_test_dirs\output_sub_dir_3\"
options = /E /F /G /H /K /O /R /V /X /Y
Result: Access denied
Result: 0 File(s) copied
======= case 4 ==================
"k:\software\dir_time-date\"
"k:\software\xcopy002_test\xcopy002_test_dirs\output_sub_dir_4\"
options = /E /F /G /H /K /R /V /Y
Result: Invalid path
Result: 0 File(s) copied
======= case 5 ==================
"k:\software\dir_time-date\"
"k:\software\xcopy002_test\xcopy002_test_dirs\output_sub_dir_5\"
options = /E /F /G /H /K /O /R /S /X /Y
Result: Invalid path
Result: 0 File(s) copied
======= case 6 ==================
"k:\software\dir_time-date"
"k:\software\xcopy002_test\xcopy002_test_dirs\output_sub_dir_6\"
options = /E /F /G /H /I /K /O /R /S /X /Y
Result: Access denied
Result: 0 File(s) copied
======= case 7 ==================
"k:\software\dir_time-date"
"k:\software\xcopy002_test\xcopy002_test_dirs\output_sub_dir_7"
options = /E /F /G /H /I /K /R /S /Y
Result: 20 File(s) copied
======= case 8 ==================
"k:\software\dir_time-date"
"k:\software\xcopy002_test\xcopy002_test_dirs\output_sub_dir_8"
options = /E /F /G /H /I /K /O /R /S /X /Y
Result: Access denied
Result: 0 File(s) copied
======= case 9 ==================
"k:\software\dir_time-date"
"k:\software\xcopy002_test\xcopy002_test_dirs\output_sub_dir_9"
options = /I /S
Result: 20 File(s) copied
======= case 10 ==================
"k:\software\dir_time-date"
"k:\software\xcopy002_test\xcopy002_test_dirs\output_sub_dir_10"
options = /E /I /S
Result: 20 File(s) copied