FastCopy

A GUI wrapper for Windows' built-in robocopy and xcopy.

Features

• Easy to use copy/paste/move/delete dialog, just like your good old explorer, but much faster🚀

• Support the new Windows 11 context menu, and the old windows context menu, with the fluent design icon adapted to Light/Dark theme

• Integration with Windows Notification Center: a notification toast will pop up when the copy is finished

• Speed graph

• Confirmation Dialog

• Integration with taskbar: a progress bar sync with the one inside the window

• Settings

Chinese	English

• Multi-language support
  • English
  • 中文

Installation (before publish to Microsoft Store)

1. Go to the Release Page, download the zip file in the Asset section of the latest version
2. Unzip, double-click to open the certificate file ended in .cert, click Install Certificate. Choose Local Machine in the dialog, click Next
3. Choose Place all certificates in the following store, click Browser, and in the dialog choose Trusted root certification authorities
4. Then click Next and finally Finish to install the certificate.
5. Now you can double-click the msix to install the app.
6. In rare situations, you might need to restart explorer.exe to see RobocopyEx in the right-click context menu

Usage

1. Using file explorer, select some files/folders, as many as you want >> right click >> move to RobocopyEx >> select Copy or Move
2. Go to destination folder, right click at empty space >> move to RobocopyEx >> select Paste

Development

Project structure

FastCopy
    FastCopy\               --- Main project
    FastCopyShellExtension\ --- A dll project for registering the new Windows context menu
    SpeedTest\              --- A speed test project for measuring various copying method under Windows
    UnitTest\               --- Unit test for above projects
    FastCopy.sln            --- The solution file for all the projects

Build pre-requisites

• Visual Studio 2019+, with C++20 support & Universal Windows development workload
• Windows App Sdk, with C++ template
• Additional dependencies per project:
  • FastCopy:
    • spdlog
    • boost-algorithm
  • SpeedTest:
    • abseil
    • ftxui
    • cereal

vcpkg is the recommended package manager to handle these dependencies. They are installed automatically when building within Visual Studio.

Other component comes from my very own WinUIEssentials, which will be installed automatically by Visual Studio nuget.

Known issue

• App crash after the window closed (does not affect users, low priority)

Recommendation

Please install the Child Process Debugger, so that the debugger would break at the copying process (after you launch the settings process). That is, you run the program first (so it goes into settings), then copy-paste a file, then the debugger will break automatically. Strongly recommended!

Translation

For contribution to translation, there are 2 places to be translated:

• The main project, in FastCopy/Strings/<language>/Resources.resw
• The shell extension project, in FastCopyShellExtension/CopyOperationNames.cpp CopyOperationNames::GetInstance()

Prototype

Figma link, you may need to ask for permission.

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Technical details

Speed comparison

In the SpeedTest project, you can find the speed comparison between various copying methods we investigated. A table for summary:

Method	Copy	Move	Delete
xcopy	✅	❌	❌
robocopy	✅	✅	❌
std::filesystem	✅	✅	✅
IFileOperation	✅	✅	✅
SHFileOperation	✅	✅	✅

My spec:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9950x
• SSD
  • Same drive: Samsung 870 QVO 1TB @ SATA 6Gbps
  • Different drive: Fanxiang S500 Pro 2TB @ PCI-E 3.0 4x -> Samsung 870 QVO 1TB @ SATA 6Gbps
• Motherboard: MSI X870 Tomahawk Wifi

The Results:

1. Copy same drive -> same drive:

Method	1 GB of 4 KB small files	4 GB of 1 GB large files
xcopy	2:29	0:00
robocopy	2:19	0:30
std::filesystem	2:25	0:54
IFileOperation	6:19	0:00
SHFileOperation	8:59	0:00

*IFileOperation and SHFileOperation actually keeps eating 100% of Disk usage in taskmgr after the API returns, meaning the API does an early return, which does not really counts.

2. Copy different drive -> different drive:

Method	1 GB of 4 KB small files	4 GB of 1 GB large files
xcopy	2:20	0:00
robocopy	1:58	0:08
std::filesystem	2:39	0:01
IFileOperation	6:12	0:00
SHFileOperation	8:50	0:00

3. Move same drive -> same drive:

Method	1 GB of 4 KB small files	4 GB of 1 GB large files
xcopy	N/A	N/A
robocopy	2:52	0:17
std::filesystem	0:00	0:00
IFileOperation	3:44	0:01
SHFileOperation	5:31	0:00

4. Move different drive -> different drive:

Method	1 GB of 4 KB small files	4 GB of 1 GB large files
xcopy	N/A	N/A
robocopy	2:25	0:08
std::filesystem	N/A	N/A
IFileOperation	12:58	0:08
SHFileOperation	15:48	0:06

5. Delete:

Method	1 GB of 4 KB small files	4 GB of 1 GB large files
xcopy	N/A	N/A
robocopy	N/A	N/A
std::filesystem	0:19	0:01
IFileOperation	0:42	0:00
SHFileOperation	2:28	0:00