Replicate a Cabinet’s Structure

It’s sometimes necessary to replicate the drawers, and perhaps also the folders, of a cabinet without copying any of the files. For example, you may want to start with an empty cabinet at the beginning of each year, but still have your current drawer and folder structure.

There’s a DOS trick you can use to do this. Use the first line below if you only want to copy the drawers, or the second line if you want to copy folders too:

xcopy /T source target
xcopy /T /E source target

Here’s how it would work. Suppose I have a cabinet at c:\mycabinets\2008 and I want to create a 2009 cabinet with exactly the same structure, including all current drawers and subfolders, but without any of the files. I want the new cabinet to be at c:\cabinets\2009.

First I need to open a command prompt (DOS window), which can be done from the Windows "Start" button > "Run", and enter "cmd" (without quotes) as the program to run. Then I would type the following command:

xcopy /T /E "c:\cabinets\2008" "c:\cabinets\2009\"

Notice that the first path doesn’t end in a backslash "\" but the second path does. The quotation marks are also important, especially if there are spaces in any of the paths.

To only copy the drawers (not the subfolders), omit the "/E":

xcopy /T "c:\cabinets\2008 Files" "c:\cabinets\2009 Files\"