Using Robocopy to Move Files and Folders

I use Robocopy a lot, and it's been in my Toolbox for so long that I hardly remember using anything else. I was glad to see that it is now included out-of-the-box (starting with Vista), because I typically use it instead of Windows Explorer to move or copy files, since I prefer the way it reports the progress of the lengthy file operations.

Note that when you specify the "/S /MOV" or "/E /MOV" options (to recursively move files from one location to another), it may leave behind a bunch of empty folders depending on the contents of the source and what you specify to move.

Over a year ago I went through the rather painful effort of organizing my thousands of digital photos. During the process of moving thousands of files around to various folders, I ended up with lots of empty folders in my source folder structure.

As I discovered earlier this week, you can specify the /MOVE option (instead of /MOV) to move both the files and directories, and delete them from the source after they are copied.

Perhaps now my blog post from earlier this week about deleting empty folders makes a little more sense ;-)

Sometimes I'm amazed at what I learn while blogging. I had just been in such the habit of using the /MOV option that I never gave it any thought (that is, until this week).