How do you turn off 'are you sure you want copy without properties?' prompt?

[windozer]

I have to back up to an LTFS volume, this involves copying a selection of folders each with a large number of different files inside.

This process can take 5-9 hours depending on certain factors, so overnight and weekend backups are a must. However, unfortunately a couple of hours, or a few minutes, or even half an hour in; the copy is paused and a prompt comes up asking if I'm sure I want to copy directories without all their properties. A similar prompt comes up soon after, between a few minutes to an hour, asking the same thing about certain files.

I always want to copy these items without their properties and don't need to be prompted. I tried to overcome the problem via remote administration but the damned second prompt came up and undid all my good work. Is there anyway I can have windows simply always copy folders without all their properties and not ask me about it?

 

[TrainableMan]

I don't have an answer to your question but I do possibly have an alternative. It sounds like you are manually copying huge amounts of data and you might consider a free program like Microsoft's Synctoy to do it for you.

 

[windozer]

Thanks man, it's an interesting proposition. We originally had some backup software in mind for the task which worked like more traditional approaches to tape based archiving and did not use LTFS however it proved to be untenably slow and we're waiting on a response from the vendor on why that would be, in the mean time we've just gone ahead with LTFS and windows explorer where at least we can get high transfer speeds (up to 145 MB/s).

The thing with Synctoy however though is that while it would help one to keep a track of frequently changing sets of files and directories without the risk of forgetting certain things or not noticing things had updated or changed between volumes, the nature of LTO tape is that it's linear and therefore can't be randomly accessed. When a backup is performed, one write operation at a time must be carried out or the bit streams for different items being copied will be interleaved across the tape and mean the tape has to constantly wind forward and back to different sections of tape in order to pull a file, rather than simply locate the beginning of a file and read in a constant stream until it's end as it would had the files been placed in order one by one. The tape also necessarily has very slow seek time and therefore it's not really an option that it be constantly or frequently mounted to begin syncing with something on a server as one doesn't want to be constantly starting writes just for small incremental changes. This would mean then that for our purposes we'd still have to be manually compiling a single source of material to be placed to tape, then getting Synctoy to initiate a sync which would make the situation pretty much the same.

Best practice is to take one large set of material to copy, initiate a transfer and go, this is also usually done so that I can delete the material from its original location, so it's also unlikely that further items will be added to a set of data marked for tape backup.

However if Synctoy would avoid windows prompting the user to answer whether it's okay to backup files without properties then it would solve that problem.

 

[TrainableMan]

The way synctoy works, it maintains a file on each location and only updates files that change, so I take it back, I don't believe it would work well with a linear tape. I should have looked up LTFS as I mistakenly thought it was just a typo for NTFS; I haven't seen tape backups in this century.

Do you COPY via a batch job? If so maybe try XCOPY instead.

Maybe someone else will have some ideas. Does the manufacturer of your tape backup system have a forum, as I would recommend you look/ask there?

 

[windozer]

Yeh thanks anyway though mate. I'll try the tape drive manufacturer forum if I can find one, good idea. Tape's still pretty much the way to go even today when it comes to long term archived storage, funny how some things don't change much in 30-40 years. They're especially prevalent in video production environments to comply with insurance regulations regarding taking reasonable steps to protect data against media failure or degradation.

I basically put everything I want to be copied in to a single directory and drag and drop on to the tape which in the case of an LTFS formatted tape, appears in windows just like a mounted drive. Windows then takes care of sequentially copying file by file, directory by directory, at the lower level the LTFS drivers probably take care of anything more specific to how tape needs to operate. I have yet to try Xcopy, though I did give robocopy a shot with a single, 70 Gigabyte file. It was promising, didn't ask anything about properties but it's hard to know if it's just because that directory didn't have any of the particular properties that windows thinks it's unable to copy or if it's because using robocopy solves that particular issue.

The only real way to test would be to copy a whole 2.5TB tape sized batch but I'm reluctant to do that because it takes anywhere between 6-9 hours and robocopy lacks any kind of a progress bar. It's especially important that there be a progress bar because there was an issue just the other day where the LTFS drivers plugin failed and windows continually tried to access the tape volume and then fail at the presumably the same point on the tape each time causing a constant loop with the tape drive making sounds that sound identical to normal, functioning operation, had I not known that nothing was copying, I'd well have believed everything was fine.

Does xcopy provide decent reporting of progress? Again I know there is tape backup software out there which we'll investigate or hopefully get our existing software to work at proper speed and skip the whole ltfs thing but at the moment it actually works pretty well except for this one hitch with the damn properties prompt.

 

[TrainableMan]

XCOPY would be a batch command so no, there is no progress indicator.

 

[Josh Whitkin]

My crude but effective solution is a 7-line script. Whenever the dreaded dialog appears, the script presses Alt-A for "do this for all", and Alt-Y for "yes, lose the properties." It uses AutoITScript.

On Github, search for suppress-property-loss-dialog-during-copy-in-Windows-Explorer. Follow instructiions in Readme to install.

Obviously, this script is a crude workaround. I would LOVE IT if someone figured out how to suppress those dialogs in the first place! Please update the Github with a text note if you do know of a better way (ie a registry setting):


cheers-

-Josh


Josh Whitkin

Oakland, California 94611