Looking for a faster way to transfer file to a windows network share

Update: This is just for one way transfer. No need to sync.

I am currently using Robocopy to transfer a huge file which is zipped and send to a remote network share.

Is there a faster tool? Lately, file sizes have been increasing and the transfer process is taking more time. Any help would be great.

Check out RichCopy.

From the web site:

RichCopy is a free utility that comes to us from Ken Tamaru of Microsoft. The tool was first developed in 2001 and has been updated regularly to keep pace with evolving needs. Trust me when I tell you, this is the answer to all your file copying needs. What you'll find most striking the first time you take RichCopy out for a spin is that it's a multithreaded copying tool. That means that rather than copying one file at a time in serial order, RichCopy can open multiple threads simultaneously, allowing many files to be copied in parallel and cutting the total time required to complete the operation several times over. You can also pause and resume file copy operations, so if you lose network connectivity at any point, you can just pick up where you left off.

This may sound like a lot, but upgrade both ends to Vista/Server 2008. I did some informal tests over a quiet (10 computer) 100MB network. According to the rate shown in the copy dialog and the network monitor in the Resource Monitor, I was using about 97% of the 100MB line.

Other than that, use a more powerful compression method that zip? Maybe bzip2 or lzma ? You'd need to test them based on the type of data you're compressing.

If you can set up FTP on the destination server, you might very well see some benefit in using that instead of poky ol' SMB. And it's probably easier than upgrading both boxes to Server 2k8...

Regardless of which transfer protocol you use, you can increase throughput by increasing the TCP Window size of the client side system as high as you can set it. This defines the maximum packet size the client can receive. I've seen as much as 2x improvement over a WAN compared with default settings on Windows 2000.

Wikipedia has a TCP Tuning article that explains some of this. Windows lets you set TCP window size globally or per interface.