New year, new tool - TeraCopy

For various reasons I'm not going to start 2018 with an ambitious to do list as I did in 2017 ...I've still got to do much of what I said I was going to do in 2017 and my desk needs another tidy!

In 2017 I struggled to make as much progress as I would have liked - that old problem of having too much to do and simply not enough hours in the day.

So it seems like a good idea to blog about a new tool I have just adopted this week to help me use the limited amount of time I've got more effectively!

The latest batch of material I've been given to ingest into the digital archive consists of 34 CD-ROMs and I've realised that my current ingest procedures were not as efficient as they could be. Virus checking, copying files over from 1 CD and then verifying the checksums is not very time consuming, but when you have to do this 34 times, you do start to wonder whether your processes could be improved!

In my previous ingest processes, copying files and then verifying checksums had been a two stage process. I would copy files over using Windows Explorer and then use FolderMatch to confirm (using checksums) that my copy was identical to the original.

But why use a two stage process when you can do it in one go?

I'd seen TeraCopy last year whilst visiting The British Library (thanks Simon!) so decided to give it a go. It is a free file transfer utility with a focus on data integrity.

So, I've installed it on my PC. Now, whenever I try and copy anything in Windows it pops up and asks me whether I want to use TeraCopy to make my copy.

One of the nice things about this is that this will also pop up when you accidentally click and drop a directory into another directory in Windows Explorer (who hasn't done that at least once?) and gives you the opportunity to cancel the operation.

When you copy with TeraCopy it doesn't just copy the files for you, but also creates checksums as it goes along and then at the end of the process verifies that the checksums are the same as they were originally. Nice! You need to tweak the settings a little to get this to work.

TeraCopy busy copying some files for me and creating checksums as it goes

When copying and verifying is complete it tells you how many files it has
verified and shows matching checksums for both copies - job done!

So, this has made the task of copying data from 34 CDs into the digital archive a little bit less painful and has made my digital ingest process a little bit more efficient.

...and that from my perspective is a pretty good start to 2018!

Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist