FastCopy puts robocopy in the Windows right-click menu

The whole tool is a front end for a program Windows already ships

FastCopy is described as a GUI wrapper for the built-in robocopy, with a struck through mention of xcopy in the project description that shows the earlier direction. That framing is the whole architecture, and it explains both the feature list and the limits. There is no copy engine of its own. When you copy a folder, the application drives robocopy, which is the Microsoft tool that has shipped with Windows for two decades and is what people use for large tree copies with retries and multithreading. The benefit of the wrapper is interface: the Windows 11 context menu and the old Windows context menu are both supported, with a fluent design icon adapted to the light and dark theme, so the operation appears where a user already expects to find it rather than in a separate program. The cost is that everything robocopy cannot do is also out of reach, and everything robocopy does well is inherited.

Copy, move and delete from the same Explorer context menu

The usage flow is two right clicks. Using file explorer, select some files or folders, as many as you want, then right click and move to RobocopyEx, then select Copy or Move. To paste, go to the destination folder, right click at empty space, move to RobocopyEx and select Paste. The delete operation appears in the same menu, which is what distinguishes this from a plain copy utility, and the README notes in its feature summary that xcopy and robocopy do not support delete while the newer Win32 filesystem and shell APIs do. A confirmation dialog is included, which is a sensible default for a destructive action reached from a context menu where a mis-click is easy. The menu is registered by a separate shell extension DLL, so the entries appear in Explorer itself rather than in a window of the application's own.

A speed graph and a taskbar bar turn a background copy into visible work

The two nicest touches are about feedback rather than function. There is a speed graph, so during a copy you can see throughput over time, and there is taskbar integration with a progress bar that syncs with the one inside the window. For long copies of large trees, which is exactly the case where robocopy earns its place, the difference between a frozen dialog and a visible rate matters. There is also integration with the Windows Notification Center, so a toast notification pops up when the copy is finished, which frees the user from watching a progress bar for a job that may take an hour. A settings screen exists with both Chinese and English versions of the interface, and multi-language support is listed for English and Chinese. The application is a C++20 project using the Windows App SDK with WinUI 3.

The speed table in the repository compares five copy mechanisms

The FastCopy repository contains a SpeedTest project for measuring various copying method under Windows, and the README publishes a summary table of which methods support copy, move and delete. xcopy supports copy only, robocopy supports copy and move, and std::filesystem, IFileOperation and SHFileOperation support all three. The measurements were taken on a specific machine, an AMD Ryzen 9950x with an SSD, and the results are reported per scenario, for example copying 1 GB of 4 KB small files or 4 GB of 1 GB large files on the same drive and on different drives. On the same drive small file case, robocopy records 2:19, xcopy 2:29, std::filesystem 2:25, IFileOperation 6:19 and SHFileOperation 8:59. There is an important caveat attached to the two shell API rows, because IFileOperation and SHFileOperation actually keep eating 100% of Disk usage in taskmgr after the API returns, meaning the API does an early return, which does not really count. That is why the large file figures for those methods are struck through. Read the table as a claim about robocopy being competitive, not as a precise benchmark you can rely on for your own hardware.

Installing from a release means trusting a certificate into the root store

The install path is the part to read carefully. Before publishing to Microsoft Store, the documented steps are to go to the release page, download the zip file in the Asset section of the latest version, unzip it, double-click the certificate file ending in .cert and click Install Certificate, choosing Local Machine in the dialog. You then choose Place all certificates in the following store, click Browser, and select Trusted root certification authorities, then finish the wizard. After that you double-click the msix to install the app. In other words, the manual install path asks you to add a certificate to the machine's trusted root store before the application can be installed, which is a significant privilege to grant a utility. A Microsoft Store listing exists as an alternative, and winget is the shortest route, with a single command:

winget install robocopyex

One small operational detail is worth knowing, since the documentation mentions that in rare situations you might need to restart explorer.exe to see RobocopyEx in the right-click context menu.

The build needs Visual Studio, the Windows App SDK and a shell extension

Building from source is a Windows toolchain job with a specific shape. The solution contains several projects: FastCopy as the main project, FastCopyShellExtension as a dll project for registering the new Windows context menu, SpeedTest as a speed test project for measuring various copying method under Windows, and UnitTest for the above projects, all under FastCopy.sln. The top level of the repository adds more: FastCopyKeyboardHook, RobocopyInjection, PackageDlls and Public. The pre-requisites are Visual Studio 2019 or later with C++20 support and the Universal Windows development workload, plus the Windows App SDK with the C++ template. Per project dependencies are listed too, with spdlog and boost-algorithm for FastCopy, and abseil, ftxui and cereal for SpeedTest. vcpkg is the recommended package manager and the dependencies are installed automatically when building within Visual Studio, with vcpkg.json at the repository root. Another component comes from the same author's WinUIEssentials, which is installed automatically by Visual Studio nuget.

A known crash and a debugging recommendation are documented openly

The project documents its own rough edges, which is a good sign for a tool that installs a shell extension. Under known issue there is one entry: an app crash after the window closed, which does not affect users and is listed as low priority. The crash happens when the program closes, and the repository is structured so that RobocopyInjection can be used to see it. The recommendation section tells contributors to install the Child Process Debugger so the debugger would break at the copying process after launching the settings process, with the workflow being to run the program first so it goes into settings, then copy paste a file, and the debugger breaks automatically. For a shell extension that launches a child copy process, that is a reasonable debugging setup and a hint about how the copy is actually invoked.

Where FastCopy is the wrong tool

Three limits are worth naming. The first is automation. Everything here is reached through a right-click menu, and there is no command line mode, no scheduling and no unattended path, so a nightly backup or a scripted sync has to be done with robocopy directly or with another tool that can be driven from a scheduler. The second is platform. The application is a Windows App SDK and WinUI 3 project with a Windows shell extension DLL, so it does not run on macOS or Linux, where the equivalent behaviour comes from a different set of tools entirely. The third is the security posture of a shell extension that runs robocopy under your account. A context menu handler is loaded into every Explorer process, which is a different trust model from a standalone application you launch deliberately, and the manual install path compounds that by asking for a root certificate in the trusted root store. There is also a functional difference from robocopy itself worth remembering. The wrapper presents a fixed set of operations, so any robocopy switch you rely on, the retry behaviour, the mirroring options, the logging switches, is reachable only by leaving the GUI and running the command yourself. The licence is MIT, so there is no obstacle to reading the code or vendoring the parts you trust, and the repository is not archived with the last push on 2026-09-19, though it publishes no GitHub releases of its own.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt FastCopy if you work on Windows, want robocopy behaviour from the Explorer context menu, and are willing to trust a shell extension that runs with your privileges. Skip it if you need scheduled or scripted copies, since the project offers no command line mode, or if you are on macOS or Linux, where it does not run. Verify first that the certificate and package you install come from the release page and not from a mirror, since the install path asks you to trust a root certificate before the app will install at all.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. HO-COOH/FastCopy on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: MIT
4. README