XCopy and Insufficient Memory Error

Recently I came across an interesting situation pertaining to XCopy so I thought of sharing my experience with you. As part of my daily backup procedure, I use the MS-DOS based XCopy command in a .bat file (scheduled) to copy over a large number of files from one machine to the other. The XCopy command has been working fine ever since until recently I noticed that the entire data was not copied over.

I ran the .bat file manually to see what was going on. After some time, the command window displayed the following message:

Insufficient Memory…

I was using a powerful machine and memory (RAM) was not an issue. After doing some googling, I finally figured out the source of the problem which had nothing to do (at least in my case) with having enough memory. The problem was a long file name which didn’t allow the XCopy command to run to completion. You must be surprised but read on.

The XCopy command fails to handle a fully qualified filename (filename + path) which is greater than 254 characters (which is by the way also the maximum path length allowed by Microsoft OS). The message Insufficient Memory… is very misleading and doesn’t reveal the actual problem.

I went ahead to shorten the name of a few files which fixed the problem. But if this is not the desired solution for you then you can look into using XXCopy (commercial) or Robocopy (free - Microsoft). Although I haven’t used any of these, I have seen some people complaining about XXCopy still not doing the job. Robocopy on the other hand, seem to be a suitable solution. So you can try your luck with that (if you don’t want to shorten the filename :- ).

Stay tuned for more…