RichCopy

~ the last words ~

RichCopy was a file copier for Windows written by a Microsoft engineer named Ken Tamaru, first built in 2001. Keith Combs announced it on his TechNet blog on 22 March 2009, and the following month Joshua Hoffman gave it the Utility Spotlight column in TechNet Magazine, which is how most of the world met it. The stable version was 4.0.217. It was free, and it was not a product.

The reason it mattered is in a number Hoffman put in his own article. Back in November 2006 he had written up Robocopy GUI, a small tool by another Microsoft engineer that did nothing except put a window on the existing Robocopy command. More than two years later, that piece was still the single most-read thing TechNet Magazine had ever published, with well over 220,000 views. A magazine for system administrators, full of deep technical material, and the most wanted article in its history was a graphical front end for copying files.

RichCopy went further than a front end. It opened many threads at once, so a folder of thousands of small files went across in parallel rather than in single file, and the total time dropped by a multiple rather than a percentage. You could pause a copy and resume it, which meant a network hiccup no longer cost you the whole transfer. Underneath there were filters by filename and extension, plus per-attribute control over what got preserved. The window could even print out the command line equivalent of whatever you had just clicked together.

What it never had was an owner. The Utility Spotlight column said it plainly in the last line: provided as-is, not supported by Microsoft. The bugs it shipped with in 2009 were the bugs it had in 2010, and they stayed. It would not copy open files, which for a backup tool is a real limitation and not a small one.

~ the record ~

~ what an engineer actually wanted ~

This is one of the few things on this site I am not writing about from a distance. Moving a large directory across a link that drops is a problem I have had, first in the dial-up years when a failed transfer meant starting over from nothing, and later on a TTNet line that was faster without being any more reliable. The Windows answer for most of that stretch was xcopy, or Robocopy if you happened to know it existed, and neither one told you anything useful while it ran.

RichCopy's real contribution was not the threading. It was that you could watch it. A progress view with counts on it changes the experience of a two-hour copy more than shaving forty minutes off it does, because the thing you are actually fighting at three in the morning is not knowing whether the transfer is alive.

~ the funny part ~

Nobody at Microsoft ever announced that RichCopy was over. There was no end-of-life notice and no final post on Tamaru's blog. The date everyone now cites, 2010, traces back to a 2019 listicle counting up discontinued Microsoft utilities, which noticed the thing had stopped and wrote the year down.

That is a strange epitaph for software that a hundred thousand administrators downloaded. It is also the standard one for internal tools that escape. Nobody owned it enough to kill it properly.

~ still in the archive ~

The download link outlived the product. RichCopy shipped as a self-extracting executable on Microsoft's download center, and the Wikipedia article now points at a Wayback Machine copy of that exact binary, captured in 2019, still version 4.0.217. You can run the last build of a discontinued Microsoft utility in about thirty seconds.

Someone else noticed the gap too. A company called GuruSquad sells a paid tool called GS RichCopy 360, whose headline feature is copying open files, the one thing Tamaru's version could never do. The name is doing a lot of work in that product, and nothing stops it, because the original never had anyone standing behind it to object.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »