Copying Files and Directories With Progress in C#

The .Net Framework doesn’t have any method to copy directories recursively. It doesn’t either support getting progress on file copies. So I decided to write two extension methods to fill up the gap.

Features

These extension methods are attached to FileInfo and DirectoryInfo and allow you to:

• Copy a single file with progress notifications.
• Copy a directory recursively with or without progress notifications.
• The progress updates includes the number of bytes transferred and the total number of bytes being copied, both for the currently transferring file, and for the whole operation.
• The progress updates also include the filename being currently copied.

Behind the scenes I use Interop to call CopyFileEx and the code is fairly optimized but it should also be simple to adapt it to your needs.

Usage

To copy a file and display progress, you first create a FileInfo instance for the file you want to copy, then you call the new extension method.

var fileInfo = new FileInfo("C:/Copy/This.file");
fileInfo.CopyTo("C:/Dest/Folder", (p) => {
    Progress = (double)p.BytesTransferred / p.TotalBytes;
});

If you want to copy a folder, you get some more progress information, as you can see here:

var dirInfo = new DirectoryInfo("C:/Copy/From/");
dirInfo.CopyTo("C:/Copy/To/", (p) => {
    TotalProgress = (double)p.BytesTransferred / p.TotalBytes;
    FileProgress = (double)p.CurrentFileTransferred / p.CurrentFileSize;
    CurrentFile = p.CurrentFileName;
});

Download

The code can be downloaded here, CopyExtensions.cs. Enjoy!

This work is in the Public Domain.