Overview

TeraCopy is a tiny freeware program that can copy your files faster than the standard Windows Explorer speed.

Review

TeraCopy was recommended to me a few weeks ago by Cokehead, one of my readers. I was quite curious about it since Cokehead said that he “absolutely loves” this freeware program. Here’s what he said:

I absolutely LOVE Terracopy. You should take a look at it. It makes copying/moving files MUCH faster; I’m not 100% sure exactly how it works; I believe it places files next to eachother on the hard drive, making the head having to move less; plus it seems to precache files in advance as you copy them.

Overall, it’s just faster, and it’s one of those tiny programs you don’t notice until you need to use it. 

As I said, I was quite curious about it and I decided to give it a go. I grabbed my stopwatch and organized a quick contest between the standard Windows Explorer copy function and TeraCopy. I copied the Freeware Mission Megapack 2008 zip file, around 630 MB, to my USB stick.

Windows Explorer copied the file in 1 minute and 22.08 seconds. Now let’s see how much time will TeraCopy need for the same job.

The file was copied in 1 minute and 20.55 seconds, just 2 seconds faster than Windows Explorer. Not too bad, but not very spectacular. So far the only thing that makes TeraCopy stand out is the possibility to pause the file transfer and to resume it later, a feature that is missing from the standard Windows file copying process.

Wait, it’s not over yet. I decided to put the program to a more difficult test, to copy a 3.33 GB folder with 1435 files in it from one of my hard disks to another. Windows Explorer did the job in 2 minutes and 2 seconds. TeraCopy did the same thing in… 1 minute and 38 seconds, significantly faster indeed! So there you go, TeraCopy really does copy your files faster.

Another great thing about it is that it integrates well in the Windows Explorer context menu, just install the program and it will do the job for you. It will even handle the file transfers if you use the “copy” and “paste” commands in Windows Explorer, it simply takes over all the file copying and moving. According to their website the technology behind TeraCopy is not too complicated: it uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times.  It also uses asynchronous copy to speed up file transfer between two physical hard drives. The program also offers a error recovery feature,  in case of copy error, it will try several times and if it won’t work it will just skip the file, not terminating the entire transfer.

Version Tested

2.0 beta 4a

Author

Code Sector

Operating System

Windows 2000, XP, Vista

Download link

Summary

 Integrates very well in the system, just install and forget about it.

 It really is faster

 Has a paid version with more features (it doesn’t nag you about it though)

Rating

Verdict

I have to thank Cokehead for recommending this freeware program to me, it really works, it copies your files faster, and it integrates easily in the Windows shell. TeraCopy is another one of the tiny freeware programs that make your computer life a lot easier.

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If you have any trouble with this software just leave a comment, I’ll help you out! If you know better free programs in the same category, please let me know!