robocopy error with ERROR 32 (0x00000020)

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I have two drives A and B. Using a python script I am creating some files in "A" drive and I am running a powerscript which copies all the files in the drive A to drive B in the interval of 1 sec.

I am getting this error in my powershell.

2015/03/10 23:55:35 ERROR 32 (0x00000020) Time-Stamping Destination File \x.x.x.x\share1\source\ Dummy_100.txt The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. Waiting 30 seconds...

How will I overcome this error?

robocopy
asked on Stack Overflow Mar 10, 2015 by rabi shaw • edited Mar 14, 2015 by Bjoern

4 Answers

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This happened is because the file is locked by running process. To fix this, download Process Explorer. Then use Find>Find Handle or DLL, find out which process locked this file. Use 'taskkill' to kill that process in commandline. You will be fine.

answered on Stack Overflow Mar 12, 2015 by Oseack
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How will I overcome this error?

If backup is, what you got in mind, and you encounter in-use files frequently, you look into Volume Shadow Copies (VSS), which allow to copy files despite them being ‘in use’. It's not a product, but a windows technology used by various backup tool.

Sadly, it's not built into robocopy, but can be used in conjunction with it. See

➝ https://superuser.com/a/602833/75914

and especially:

➝ https://github.com/candera/shadowspawn

answered on Stack Overflow Apr 27, 2016 by Frank Nocke • edited Mar 20, 2017 by Community
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if you want to skip this files you can use /r:n that n is times of tries for example /w:3 /r:5 will try 5 time every 3 seconds

answered on Stack Overflow Aug 28, 2019 by Reza Mosallanejad • edited Aug 28, 2019 by heck1
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It could be many reasons.

In my case, I was running a CMD script to copy from one server to another, a heap of SQL Server backups and transaction logs. I too had the same problem because it was trying to write into a log file that was supposedly opened by another process. It was not.

I ran many IP checks and Process ID checkers that I ran out of knowing what was hogging the log file. Event viewer said nothing.

I found out it was not even the log file that was being locked. I was able to delete it by logging into the server as a normal user with no admin privileges!

It was the backup files themselves by the SQL Server Agent. Like @Oseack said, there may have been the need to use another tool whilst the backup files themselves were still being used or locked by the SQL Server Agent.

The way I got around it was to force ROBOCOPY to wait.

/W:5

did it.

answered on Stack Overflow Aug 29, 2017 by Fandango68

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