Using “robocopy” to Copy EFS Files

When required to move large amounts data from one location to another, we use robocopy. Why? It’s basically like rsync for Linux, it copies NTFS Security ACL’s and will do file compare on every file to ensure that the destination has the most current version of the file.

So when moving over 50 + user folders, it comes in handy. We simply run robocopy a couple of days before to do the large sync of data. Then we run it during a maintenance window to update any files that have been modified or created.

It works great! But its biggest feature is that it will copy EFS files without the need to have the EFS certificate/key. Using the /EFSRAW switch allows for the copy of encrypted files from one location to another without having to decrypt the data.

Fore more information on the robocopy syntax please see the following site:

http://ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html