C# – Copy a folder, its content and the sub-directories

Hello Devz,

It’s unbelievable but yes, the System.IO provided by .NET doesn’t have a simple method to copy a folder, its content and the sub directories to another destination.

There are a few different techniques to copy a directory with C#, using the command XCopy, or using a recursive method.
The best one I saw was the one from MSDN:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        string sourceDirectory = @"C:\temp\source";
        string targetDirectory = @"C:\temp\destination";

        Copy(sourceDirectory, targetDirectory);

        Console.WriteLine("\r\nEnd of program");
        Console.ReadKey();
    }

    public static void Copy(string sourceDirectory, string targetDirectory)
    {
        var diSource = new DirectoryInfo(sourceDirectory);
        var diTarget = new DirectoryInfo(targetDirectory);

        CopyAll(diSource, diTarget);
    }

    public static void CopyAll(DirectoryInfo source, DirectoryInfo target)
    {
        Directory.CreateDirectory(target.FullName);

        // Copy each file into the new directory.
        foreach (FileInfo fi in source.GetFiles())
        {
            Console.WriteLine(@"Copying {0}\{1}", target.FullName, fi.Name);
            fi.CopyTo(Path.Combine(target.FullName, fi.Name), true);
        }

        // Copy each subdirectory using recursion.
        foreach (DirectoryInfo diSourceSubDir in source.GetDirectories())
        {
            DirectoryInfo nextTargetSubDir =
                target.CreateSubdirectory(diSourceSubDir.Name);
            CopyAll(diSourceSubDir, nextTargetSubDir);
        }
    }
}

Happy coding! 🙂

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