Using BITS to manage file distribution

This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Microsoft’s Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) has been around since Windows 2000 SP3 and provides a “firewall-friendly” means of transferring files across the network which also allows for restarts. It’s also the file transfer mechanism used for Windows updates (but is not exclusively used for Microsoft products) and is now at version 3.0 (included with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008).

A few weeks back, I was discussing the problem of rebuilding remote servers with some colleagues. We considered that it may be advantageous to keep a copy of the build image locally (e.g. on a branch office server) but image management (making sure that the locally cached image is the latest version) is an important concern. One of my colleagues asked if BITS could be used to control the distribution of the image files (which could be expected to be around 2GB) so I decided to dig a little further. The short answer is “yes”, but there are some things to be aware of:

Microsoft provides a command line tool called BITSAdmin (bitsadmin.exe) for monitoring the progress of BITS jobs. BITSAdmin is available as a support tool for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 but is included with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. James Finnigan has a good post introducing the concept of transferring files using BITS; Aaron Czechowski has another BITSAdmin script; Frank-Peter Schultze has a good post on scripting downloads with BITS; or refer to the full BITSAdmin syntax and examples for further details.

Various third party wrappers also exist, including:

I haven’t seen a PowerShell wrapper for BITS yet but I have used Alexander Sukhovey’s BGet command (batch) file to initiate and manage BITS file transfers.

If BITS is not appropriate, those with plenty of bandwidth might consider RoboCopy (I have used it in the past to synchronise folders across the network) but, for me, Mads Klinkby’s BITSync looks perfect – unfortunately the download link was unavailable at the time of writing this post.

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