A major difference between the two applications is the fact that Fast Copy does not hijack the original Windows copy, delete and move operations but comes only into play when the user selects the application to handle the transfers. This can be done by loading Fast Copy or adding Fast Copy entries to the right-click context menu. The option for the latter is provided in the program’s options.

Since the usage is not automatic using Fast Copy makes only sense in situations where the user has to copy many files and folders at once, for example when moving the contents of one hard drive to another. It simply takes about five to ten seconds to start the file transfer because the source and destination locations have to be added to the program manually.

The context menu entry is only adding the source location to the program but the destination would still have to be selected manually. Fast Copy uses parallel processing if the source and destination location are on different hard drives and a huge buffer if they are on the same. It comes with a lot of options that can be changed like the buffer size or actions to take if a file exists in the destination.

The command line options might make it usable for batch files that use file operations. It lacks a few of the features that TeraCopy comes with like a queue that offers options to skip files or pause the process.

Fast Copy in its current version can be used in batch files because of its command line parameters and to copy large amount of files. It does not work as a real transfer replacement for Windows and have to leave that field to Teracopy.

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TeraCopy is a nice shell enhancement for Windows replacing the original copy popup with a more advanced version. It integrates itself into the context menu so that you work as usual and don’t need to run additional external applications for the same process. TeraCopy gives you more options to copy or move files, e.g. a pause/resume function, error recovery and an dynamically adjusted buffer.

Error recovery means that it tries to copy the file several times and if it doesn’t succeed in copying this file it just continues with the next one. This means that it does not abort the whole transfer which is quite important for copying large amounts of data.

By adjusting the value of the buffer size on the fly it is possible to make the transfer commence a bit faster. I didn’t actually test it but they say it may speed up file transfers between two hard drives slightly. You can also switch between compact mode and full mode. Full mode shows a complete list of transfered files and warns about failed transfers.

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