Create Script To Copy Files From One Folder To Another On Win10 [MiniTool News]

By Sarah | Follow | Last Updated March 31, 2021

Summary :

The batch script, also known as batch file, actually refers to a list of several commands; whenever you double-click the file, the commands will be executed. If you want to copy files or folders from one folder to another automatically, creating a batch script is a nice choice. As for how to get the work done, please keep reading.

When managing your data on PC, you may need to copy or move files and folders. The permissions set on files and folders may be changed when you move/copy them by using the Windows Explorer. Did you know this?

For instance, when you copy a folder/file in an NTFS partition or from one partition to another, the Windows system will regard it as the new folder/file; in this way, you will become the CREATOR OWNER since the system will take on the permissions. That’s why using script to copy files from one folder to another is necessary.

Can You Use Script to Copy Files from One Folder to Another

The Windows clipboard provides an easy way for users to copy and paste files/folder manually. The ordinary copy process seems pretty simple: select the file/folder that needs to be copied and choose copy option; open the destination; select the paste option.

Yet, do you want to automatically move files from one folder to another? The copying and pasting process can be finished quickly by using the Windows command line.

What Is Batch File

A batch file, also known as batch script, is actually a list of commands that will be run in the Command Prompt (CMD) tool. Users can create a batch file to let CMD copy and paste files for them automatically; all they need to do is double clicking on the batch file/script and waiting.

How to Use Batch File to Copy Files

How to use Windows script to copy files? Generally, it contains two stages: create batch file and create a task to run the batch file to copy files from one folder to another.

Stage One: Create Batch File

The following steps are finished on a Windows 10 computer.

Step one: click on the Cortana icon on the taskbar (fix taskbar not working on Window 10).

Step two: type notepad into the search text box.

Step three: select Notepad app from the search result by clicking on it.

Step four: type the following script in or copy & paste it into Notepad.

@echo off

set X=

set «source=C:\ «

set «destination=D:\ «

robocopy «%source%» «%destination%» /mov /minage:%X%

exit /b

Of course, the source folder, destination folder, and number of days can be changed due to your needs.

Step five: choose File option from the menu bar and choose Save As… from submenu.

Step six:

• Give it a name and type in the File name text box; the file name format is .BAT.
• Select All Files for Save as type option to change the default file type.
• Click on the Save button at the bottom to finish this step.

Stage Two: Create Task to Run Batch File

After finish this stage, you can use the batch file to copy folder to another location.

Step one: type task scheduler into the Cortana search box.

Step two: choose Task Scheduler from the search result.

Step three: find Actions section from the right-hand panel.

Step four: select Create Task… from the list.

Step five: give a name for the task and type it into the text box after Name.

Step six: shift to Triggers tab and click on the New… button.

Step seven: define the frequency to trigger the task, choosing from One time, Daily, Weekly, and Monthly.

Step eight: set the Start time to decide when the task will be triggered and click on the OK button to confirm.

Step nine: shift to Actions tab and click on the New… button.

Step ten: click on the Browse button to find & choose the .BAT file you have created in stage one.

Step eleven: click on the OK button to confirm. Then, you can close the Task Scheduler and start to move file from one folder to another by using it.

That’s how to use Windows batch to copy file.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Position: Columnist

Sarah is working as editor at MiniTool since she was graduated from university, having rich writing experiences. Love to help other people out from computer problems, disk issues, and data loss dilemma and specialize in these things. She said it’s a wonderful thing to see people solving their problems on PC, mobile photos, and other devices; it’s a sense of accomplishment. Sarah likes to make friends in life and she’s a huge music fan.

Copy a file from one folder to another using vbscripting

Can anyone please tell me how to copy a file from one folder to another using vbscripting I had tried this below one from the information provide in the internet.

When I execute this one, I get that the permission is denied.

5 Answers 5

Try this. It will check to see if the file already exists in the destination folder, and if it does will check if the file is read-only. If the file is read-only it will change it to read-write, replace the file, and make it read-only again.

For copying the single file, here is the code:

Here’s an answer, based on (and I think an improvement on) Tester101’s answer, expressed as a subroutine, with the CopyFile line once instead of three times, and prepared to handle changing the file name as the copy is made (no hard-coded destination directory). I also found I had to delete the target file before copying to get this to work, but that might be a Windows 7 thing. The WScript.Echo statements are because I didn’t have a debugger and can of course be removed if desired.

Just posted my finished code for a similar project. It copies files of certain extensions in my code its pdf tif and tiff you can change them to whatever you want copied or delete the if statements if you only need 1 or 2 types. When a file is created or modified it gets the archive attribute this code also looks for that attribute and only copies it if it exists and then removes it after its copied so you dont copy unneeded files. It also has a log setup in it so that you will see a log of what time and day evetrything was transfered from the last time you ran the script. Hope it helps! the link is Error: Object Required; ‘objDIR’ Code: 800A01A8

Please find the below code:

Linked

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copying all contents of folder to another folder using batch file?

I have a folder in C:\Folder1

I want to copy all the contents of Folder1 to another location, D:\Folder2

How do I do this using a batch file?

12 Answers 12

xcopy.exe is the solution here. It’s built into Windows.

If you have robocopy,

if you want remove the message that tells if the destination is a file or folder you just add a slash:

xcopy /s c:\Folder1 d:\Folder2\

I see a lot of answers suggesting the use of xcopy. But this is unnecessary. As the question clearly mentions that the author wants THE CONTENT IN THE FOLDER not the folder itself to be copied in this case we can -:

Thats all xcopy can be used for if any subdirectory exists in C:\Folder1

RoboCopy did not work for me, and there are some good solutions here, but none explained the XCopy switches and what they do. Also you need quotes in case your path has spaces in it.

xcopy /i /e «C:\temp\folder 1» «C:\temp\folder 2»

Here is the documentation from Microsoft:

On my PC, xcopy and robocopy need also the path to them, i.e. C:\Windows\System32\xcopy.exe

That’s why I use simply «copy»: copy /y . \Folder1\File.txt . \Folder2\

This is how it is done! Simple, right?

Here’s a solution with robocopy which copies the content of Folder1 into Folder2 going trough all subdirectories and automatically overwriting the files with the same name:

/COPYALL copies all file information
/E copies subdirectories including empty directories
/IS includes the same files
/IT includes modified files with the same name

Note: it can be necessary to run the command as administrator, because of the argument /COPYALL . If you can’t: just get rid of it.

FYI. if you use TortoiseSVN and you want to create a simple batch file to xcopy (or directory mirror) entire repositories into a «safe» location on a periodic basis, then this is the specific code that you might want to use. It copies over the hidden directories/files, maintains read-only attributes, and all subdirectories and best of all, doesn’t prompt for input. Just make sure that you assign folder1 (safe repo) and folder2 (usable repo) correctly.

And, that’s it folks!

Add to your scheduled tasks and never look back.

I have written a .bat file to copy and paste file to a temporary folder and make it zip and transfer into a smb mount point, Hope this would help,

Batch file to copy files from one folder to another folder

I have a storage folder on a network in which all users will store their active data on a server. Now that server is going to be replaced by a new one due to place problem so I need to copy sub folders files from the old server storage folder to new server storage folder. I have below ex:

from \Oldeserver\storage\data & files to \New server\storage\data & files.

9 Answers 9

xcopy.exe is definitely your friend here. It’s built into Windows, so its cost is nothing.

Just xcopy /s c:\source d:\target

You’d probably want to tweak a few things; some of the options we also add include these:

• /s/e — recursive copy, including copying empty directories.
• /v — add this to verify the copy against the original. slower, but for the paranoid.
• /h — copy system and hidden files.
• /k — copy read-only attributes along with files. otherwise, all files become read-write.
• /x — if you care about permissions, you might want /o or /x .
• /y — don’t prompt before overwriting existing files.
• /z — if you think the copy might fail and you want to restart it, use this. It places a marker on each file as it copies, so you can rerun the xcopy command to pick up from where it left off.

If you think the xcopy might fail partway through (like when you are copying over a flaky network connection), or that you have to stop it and want to continue it later, you can use xcopy /s/z c:\source d:\target .

Windows copy command syntax and examples

Using copy command, we can copy files from one directory to another directory. This command is similar to the Linux cp command, but it does not match with the full functionality of cp. Windows copy command can be used to copy files only, we can’t copy directories.

The syntax and usecases of copy command are explained below with examples.

Copy the contents of a file to another file

Example: To copy a file from c:\data\file1.doc to D:\backup\file2.doc

If the destination file already exists you will be prompted for confirmation. To suppress this confirmation you can use /Y switch with copy command. This would be useful if you are executing copy command from a batch file.

If the destination file exists, the above command will overwrite the same without asking the user for confirmation.

Copy file to another directory

When we specify a directory path as the destination, the files will be copied with the same name. We can assign a different name by specifying the new name in the destination path. Example is shown below.

To copy the file 1.doc loated at c:\data\documents to the directory c:\data\newdocs

Copy files with white space in name

If the file name has white space within it, we can wrap up the name in double quotes.
Example: To copy file, my resume.doc to another folder

Copy multiple files

We can’t specify multiple file names in copy command. However, we can use wildcards to identify a group of files and then copy all of them in a single command.
For example, to copy all excel files from current folder to another folder F:\backup

To copy all files in current folder to another folder

Use of environment variables

We can use environment variables in the copy command to specify the path of the folders. Like USERPROFILE, SystemRoot, ProgramFiles, TEMP, WINDIR, APPDATA, HOMEPATH.

For example, to copy a file to a user’s documents folder

The above command copies the file to the My Documents folder of the current logged in user.

You may also want to read

Windows «copy» is funny. Type «copy 1 2» and the file «1» will be copied into a new file «2». Now separate them by a plus sign instead of a space (copy 1+2) and you’ll concatenate 1 and 2 and replace the old file «1» with the result of the concatenation!

Yes, we can concatenate two or more files using copy command. You need to separate the list of files using +. You can redirect the resultant data to a new file also.

The above command will not alter the file 1. It creates a new file 3 with the concatenated data of 1 & 2. If no file name is provided it stores the result in the first file.

My Win7 cannot find a copy command, and when i run xcopy, a window flashes and exits.

I have the same problem. If you solved it, could you please explain how?

If you can not find your copy.exe file, you can download it to your windows directory or C:\ Directory depending the setting on your OS you should also be able to copy and run it from system32 or system folder.

how can i combine 2 .exe files and be able to use both after concatenation

I want to copy 2 different files(.exe,.config) from source to destination server of windows.
can you please help me on this command.

Hello i have a problem with my cmd windows 7.when i try to copy a command. Like help > file.pdf. i mean in extension pdf because i have this problem only with .pdf extension but not with .txt.So whe i execute the command. No problem. Then when i go to open the file.pdf ftom user destination the file.pdf doesn’t open say that is corrupted.please do help me .thanks

i have a file contain many lines as sources and another file has the same numbre of lines as destinations. i want to copy first line as source( c:/test/*.txt) to first line in destination ( d:/test2/), secend line ( c:/test/*.pdf) to second line in destination ( E:/test3/)……

Can I use the DOS/Windows “COPY” command in a BAT file to copy a file or a short string of text to computer memory and then paste (Ctrl +V) that string or file into a document?