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Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko —  — Software — copy, file, freeware, portable, roadkil

Copying from damaged media with Unstoppable Copier

unstoppablecopier_icon Do you have any scratched discs lying around? Copying files from them might become really ugly experience. Windows has no concept of damaged media. It just copies until it fails. Sometimes failure is quick and painless, sometimes it keeps disc in the drive spinning until it explodes.

Solution is using file copying utilities. Some of these call themselves “recovery” and wait for users to pay for program they may use once a month (or year). Some are true about their function like Unstoppable Copier.

What it does

Unstoppable Copier copies file(s) from destination directory to target directory. If files are damaged it gets more thorough and attempts to re-read or skip damaged parts.

unstoppablecopier_interface

Settings

Mostly it just works but you can tweak it as well. This allows to control how hard app tries to copy damaged files or make it simply skip them. Plus few extra things.

unstoppablecopier_settings

unstoppablecopier_settings

Scripting

Unstoppable Copier works from command line so can be easily used in Windows batch files or more complex scripts like AutoIt ones. There is also option to create batch files in internal (plain text based) .UCB format and launch them from command line.

Check my post with script to copy files from multiply discs, it can be easily enhanced with Unstoppable Copier for some major disc dumping. :)

Overall

Freeware, portable, scriptable. Not something needed daily but still excellent to have around just in case.

Home&download page http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29

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3 Comments

  • Talk Binary #

    Great resource. I hate how when you try to copy something, and it doesn't work, it just freezes Explorer. Doesn't seem too difficult to implement in a program either.

  • Rarst #

    Yeah, explorer is just ugly at copying files (especially by network). And in Vista it became even worse with DRM checks and such. I think best upgrade Windows can possibly get is usable file manager.

  • Three kinds of software I totally don’t get | Rarst.net #

    [...] being able to copy files. Sure there are some utilities for copying files from damaged media (like Unstoppable Copier) that seem eerily similar. But they are doing something I actually find [...]