Exporting documents from SharePoint using RoboCopy / RichCopy utility

I was recently asked if there was a way to batch copy files out of SharePoint and be able to log success / failure. There are many tools that import files into SharePoint but not much that does the opposite. So after some thought I looked into using RoboCopy and found a great GUI version called RichCopy which can be downloaded from here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.utilityspotlight.aspx?pr=blog.

To use this utility with SharePoint you will need to map the document libraries individually to a network drive, for example:

NET USE X: http://sharepoint/documents

Once the individual document library has been mapped you are then able to specify the X drive you have mapped in RichCopy and specify a local directory to copy/move the files to.

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Click on options and select the various options that apply for you.

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You will notice that when you do export the documents it also exports the forms folder containing allitems.aspx etc. You can filter this folder so this does not copy across to the destination folder by enabling advanced options which also includes logging configuration.

Please note that this solution does not map SharePoint metadata. If this is a requirement then it is advised you look at the 3rd party offerings available to achieve this.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good post. My experience is that everytime I sync everyfile is copied to the Sharepoint instead of copy only new/changed ones.

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