For simple explorer copy/move, I highly recommend supercopier, it replace the explorer copy/move with a enhanced version that can skip files if there’s a pb etc… it also give you transfert rate and I find it much reliable than the MS one.

The other thing I do, is I keep a log of the backup in a text file by redirecting the console output to disk. That way, if there is a failure, I can read the log and know where it stopped and what the error was.

Finally, I once had a lot of trouble doing large between-machine transfers, but it had to do with the screen savers and my firewall shutting down access to the net when the screen-saver came up. If your power management causes the local drive or display to wind down, that might be happening in your overnight runs too. But XCOPY does a much better job than running at the Windows level, and you already have it on your computer. If you want, I can post a sample batch file and you can see how to customize it for what you do.

I don’t know about robocopy.exe, but it sounds like it should work well too.

Windows File Copy just isn’t very robust when copying large numbers of files, in my opinion. When it reaches one in the middle that fails, for some reason, the whole copy stops, and they you’re left with a partial copy. Then what? start over, or manually try to figure out what copied, and what didn’t.

I’ve taken to using robocopy.exe, from the Windows 2000 resource kit, when I need to copy lots of files. Very robust. Check it out – might be useful for you.