How to copy files and folders to a USB 3.0 connected drive, while preserving date and timestamps

Posted by Paul Braren on Aug 24 2011 (updated on Jul 25 2015) in

Here's my story, as I was making space recently and wished to avoid eSATA, USB 2.0, and LAN, figuring $29 to give USB 3.0 a try would be a good idea to evacuate/backup some data from my older WHSv1 system.

USB 3.0

I don't like eSATA for drive removal and cabling reasons. USB 3.0 should be similar enough in speed, and handle graceful ejection of external drive sleds. Well, that was the idea anyway, turns out USB 3.0 has been pretty flakey on Windows 2003 (which is what WHSv1 really is), and on Windows 7 x64.

Turns out the NEC Renesas USB 3.0 adapter called the StarTech 2 Port PCI Express SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Card Adapter Model PEXUSB3S2 needs to be flashed. I was putting it into an older box, and was still getting occasional disconnects during overnight copy jobs, as explained here:
forum.mediasonic.ca/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=143&p=567#p567

What's the fix?

This firmware which was explained in detail here, coupled with this NEC/Renesas USB 3.0 Host Controller Driver v.2.1.19.0, seems to be going well, worked quite nicely for a large overnight copy last night.

Robocopy

Next, download Robocopy (part of a Resource Kit install), and optionally, the Robocopy GUI if you prefer a GUI front end.

Reading about the syntax here, I then went and executed this command, on my WHSv1 box (copying from D:\shares\Install to x:\ external USB 3.0 1TB drive), 11 hours for 425GB of data:

D:\>ROBOCOPY D:\shares\Install x:\ /MIR /COPY:DAT /DCOPY:T /LOG:D:\ROBOCOPYLOG.TXT /TEE

When it was done, I could look through the D:\ROBOCOPYLOG.TXT to see what happened overnight.

Footnotes

Here’s exactly what the USB 3.0 flashing procedure looked like:

Before the upgrade, utilility says Firmware Version 3021: