I ran into my first problem installing Robocopy today when I tried to install it on a Windows 2000 Server. When I tried to install the Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools, I received the message “This product requires Windows XP or a later version to have been installed.” Since I was tight for time, I settled for Robocopy 1.7 (which came with the Windows NT 4 Resource Kit), which was the only version I found on the Internet for straight download after 20 – 30 minutes of searching. It functioned similarly to the version I have been using (XP010) but some of the switches I use were not present like /copy and /zb and /log. But it was enough to get my client’s backup working for now (I had setup the ArcServe which came with her Rev 70 drive, but the jobs kept crashing and it was too complicated for the client to really use).
Later, my employee Marvin found a nice blurb somewhere which looks to solve our problem and which I tested on a Windows 2000 Pro VM. If you download rktools.exe, you can use WinZip or a similar program to extract the files from the compressed executable; you then end up with 3 files: rktools.msi, rktools_p.cab, and rktools_s.cab. The important file here is rktools.msi. What you do next is open a command line session, go to the folder where you extracted rktools.msi, and type the following command: msiexec /a rktools.msi. You will be prompted for a folder to which to perform an administrative install. Essentially, this decompresses all of the files in the msi file to the folders in which they would normally be placed (or that’s what it appears to do). Under Progam Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools in whatever folder you installed the msi files, you will find Robocopy.exe (amongst other files). I went to a command line and the command executed without a problem. Looks like I can just copy the executable file to the Server and update my batch file with additional switches and I’ll be good to go. And now I don’t have to install the entire Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools to computers just to get the one file I need.