Manage

Transferrus Interruptus Resumes in Win10

Ed Tittel

This weekend, I stumbled across a Win10 feature I had no idea existed. Let me explain: my 15-year-old son is discovering the joys of music. I’ve got almost 1 TB of ripped CD files and digitized recordings, some dating back to my first post-college job. (I worked at the recording studio in the US Library of Congress.) While copying all that from my PC onto another drive, I tripped over the USB cable linking up the target HDD. “Uh oh!,” I thought, “time to start over again.” With some trepidation, I reconnected the drive to the PC. Immediately, a dialog box appeared and asked if I wanted to “Try Again.” Upon approval, the file copy resumed and completed. Hence my observation that transferrus interruptus resumes in Win10. That is, Win10 allows large transfers to complete, even in the face of human frailty (or stupidity).

The top item shows red in the notification bar to flag a file transfer error.
The middle item shows transfer progress at the time I pulled the USB plug, so to speak.
The bottom item, presents a “Try Again” button to resume the interrupted transfer.
[Click either middle or bottom image to see full-sized; top image is full-sized.]

Why Say: Transferrus Interruptus Resumes in Win10?

If you check the preceding sequence of screen captures you’ll see what happens when I forcibly disconnect the drive caddy with both source and target drives for a copy operation. It throws an error dialog up and asks if I’d like to try again. As long as I reconnect those drives before clicking the “Try Again” button, the copy operation resumes and continues to completion. Honestly, I had no idea that File Explorer could do this. But gosh, it’s handy to be able to resume large file transfers (like my son’s audio, or the 19.6GB VM zip file shown above) should they be interrupted part-way toward completion.

Once upon a time, you had to use 3rd-party applications to get resiliency in Windows 10 file transfer. Apparently that is no longer the case! And I, for one, am very glad to see this working quite nicely.