Robocopy: The IT Manager's Pocket Guide to File Server Migrations

Why Robocopy still matters Robocopy (Robust File Copy) has shipped inside Windows since Vista/Server 2008, and two decades later it’s still the tool most IT teams reach for when a file server has to move, mirror, or get backed up. Xcopy and plain Copy-Item don’t survive a dropped VPN tunnel, don’t preserve NTFS permissions, and don’t retry a file another process has locked for half a second. Robocopy does all three, natively, with zero extra installs — which is exactly why it earns a place in a migration runbook instead of a third-party tool.