Quickly scan through robocopy log files for errors in Outlook

Robocopy is a great tool, that great that I always thought it was a cygwin port :) If you are in the sad situation however to be responsible to monitor robocopy log files sent to Outlook for reporting, there is a trick to quickly see if errors happened, even if the log comprises of hundreds of copying or mirroring tasks.

You open the email with the robocopy logs in Outlook. Press F4 for search, type Ended : hit enter you now found the first summary report. The column FAILED should only show zeros. Then you hit SHIFT-F4which jumps to the next summary report. The good thing: Outlook scrolls the page to bottom align with the found search item, this means you can keep SHIFT-F4 pressed and loop through the entire log in no time while concentrating on that FAILED column and scan for anything but zeros.

SUMMARY REPORT OF ROBOCOPY

click on image to enlarge

This works great, but: don't do it if you do not have to. Write a script to do it for you if this is possible because you should never do a job that a script can do for you in much shorter time, much more accurate, much more reliably and with a much higher satisfaction than you :) Have a look at the post about how to create a task monitor to get more ideas.

Why do I post it then? Well to ease the pain of going through emailed log files until you write that script :)