The standard Windows file copy and move function does what it’s supposed to and gets the job done, but it isn’t exactly what you would call great at it. As file operations such as copying and moving are something most people will use frequently, you would think over the years Windows would have become as good at it as you could hope to get. Sadly this is not the case and in some copy scenarios, Windows Vista and 7 have actually got slower and lag behind XP.
Some things that would be nice would be the ability to perform functions such as pausing the copy process while you attend to something else temporarily and being able to resume afterwards. Or being able to skip a large file if you change your mind without stopping the whole process and having to start all over again, which is what would normally happen. At least Microsoft has gone some way to rectifying this in Windows 8 with an enhanced copy dialog incorporating pause and skip functions, but for everyone else, it’s either a case of being stuck with what Windows provides or use a third party utility.
If you spend a lot of time doing file operations, and Microsoft says around 50% of the average person’s time in Explorer is taken up copying, moving, renaming, and deleting, it could really save some serious time using something which handles some of those jobs far better than Windows itself. There are quite a few copy utilities around that put the ordinary Windows dialog to shame in both functionality and performance as do many copy functions included inside file managers. Tera Copy, Fast Copy, Extreme Copy or Unstoppable Copier are just a few that are faster and more useful and could provide a real benefit.
Another copy utility to try and make things easier and quicker is LD Move which has a lot of what you would expect from a program of this type. Pause and resume are supported as is the ability to move files or folders individually in the list and also choose separate target folders for each item if required. The program is Freeware and also portable although .NET 3.5 or higher is a requirement.
The program looks very much like another copy utility called QCopy but looks tidy and is easy to work your way around. Simply drag and drop your folders or files to add them to the list. They can be moved up or down the list if you want to change the copy order.
The program does have a few quirks though and they are to do with the selections in the window. Multiple entries in the list are selected only by using shortcuts such as Ctrl+A, Ctrl+click or Shift+click etc. Also the ‘Move’ tick box can only be ticked one entry at a time, you can’t for example select 50 files and choose them all to be moved at once. Not ideal while working with a large number of files. It’s probably a good idea to group the listed files in order of destination as you have to select them first and then choose where they are being sent to. If you don’t select a target folder for everything, the program seems to send those without to the root of the source drive which seems like a rather odd bug.
Simply press ‘Start‘ to begin the process, pause and skip can be used any time. The percentage and progress will be shown down the right hand side. Another slight bug is the copy speed and time seems a bit erratic often telling me I was copying files at 0.3 MB/s when it was around 70 MB/s.
Below is a simple test I ran to see how LD Move performs against some other popular copy utilities. The operation was from one HDD to another using 1068 files in 442 folders ranging from 140 bytes up to 800MB. Total size was 4.35GB and each copy was done twice and an average taken.
LD Move 1.01: 66 secs
Teracopy 2.27: 65 secs
Extreme copy 2.05: 58 secs
Unstoppable Copier 5.2: 66 secs
Directory Opus 10: 63 Secs
Windows 7: 70 Secs
Fast Copy 2.08: 52 secs
LD Move was pretty much average in terms of the copy speed but still faster than the standard Windows copy. Fast Copy and Extreme Copy are the speed kings in this test.
As it stands, LD Move is probably best suited to sending a small amount of large files or folders to different locations quickly and easily as trying to sort out the target folder and move tick box for hundreds of files individually could cause you to waste more time than you save. There are a lot of other good file copy utilities out there and with a few tweaks and fixes, LD Move could be another one.
Requires .NET Framework 3.5
Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7