What are the best Retries and Wait time switches for Robocopy?

I'm trying to find the best Robocopy commands for each situation I can think of, such as copying a folder that includes the weirdest files (such as the Windows folder), or a Windows User's folder, etc.

What are the best "retries" and "wait times between retries" numbers to use (switches /R: and /W:)?

I'm thinking of:

/R:3 /W:1 (vs the default 1million /R:1 million, /W:30 seconds)

I mean, why wait more than one second between retries?, the default is 30 seconds, why so? I guess this is intended for hard drives so the drive heads move around between reattempts?.

...then if more reattempts are needed (by looking at the log and finding errors due to bad sectors or similar), you can change the switches and try again.

Solution 1:

There is no general answer for this issue. It depends on the specific situation. If you copy within one system between memory on the same bus retries are unnecessary. If you work within a network environment which is preforming badly you'll set a high (enough) retry time. Same goes for the number of retries.

You have to "exactly" specify each situation, there is no general answer to this question.

Since you are probable looking at regular Windows Systems with HDs/SSDs I would say skip the retries altogether. It's very seldom that a e.g. locked file gets unlocked on the second or third try (and if it does you are just lucky that the other process finish in exactly this moment)... unless you have a very specific problem which is solved by 3 retries... as I said, no general answer.