Which is a better method: copy or move

[hansraj]

Guys I just read this in a book:

"Move or copy a file? There is a small catch to moving a file. The catch is if the
process does not complete the copy it will delete your file anyway. It works like this:
You right click on the file and select move. Or you right click on the file and drag it to
where you want it to go. Then release the mouse button and the OS asks you if you want
to Copy or Move the file here? You click on Move. The OS will copy the file into clip
board, then delete the original file. Then it pastes the file into the destination folder. If
some thing interrupts this operation you have just lost your file! It will be deleted from
the clip board because the os thinks it completed the move. Want to know the worst part
of this? You will not find the file in the Recycle Bin either! There are some file recovery
tools that may (note I said may) find the file"

Now till date I used to move all my files without bothering much. Even to the extent of 5 gb and above files/folders !!!!!!!!! However this reading has scared me. I always used to think that the mechanism of move is that it first copies and then permanently deletes from the orignal location. Has anyone faced any loss of data ever while moving.... would like to share the info on this....

[RaghuKL]

Have lost many files while moving them. So i always copy the file and delete the file afterwards. no matter what is mentioned in the book file recovery tools like recover my files have been able to recover the files in question.

[CA50]

Q:what happens when you copy or move a file??
A:When you copy a file from one location to a different location within the same drive, then the system just creates a link to the location files from that location where you want to copy. The link is kept in the file table whether it be FAT. FAT32 or NTFS. Again when to move the above mentioned operation is carried out, only difference is that, after creating the new link, the previous link is deleted thus we say that the file is deleted. So for a recovery software it is easy to recover the deleted link, and thus the deleted datas are recovered.

But when data are transfered from one drive to another then the datas are actually written on to the target drive and in the source drive the link is deleted.

I hope this will answer all your question

[hansraj]

@CA50
100% in agreement with you for the first explanation. That is the reason why irrespective of the folder size, lets say a folder of 10 gb, when we move(cut) within the same drive the file gets pasted almost instantly i.e 2 secs or so. Though the same file will take aroun 3-10 mins depending on the system config if its done inter-drive.

However what is critical is loosing the file link to TOC(Table of content) for a normal user. If this link is lost before completing the moving/ pasting of file to the new location, wont the file get deleted from the hard disk (Though the actual data file will remain in its physical location but the danger of getting overwritten shall be very high and even if a small part of the file gets overwritten then wont the whole file will get corrupted)?

Also in my first post I meant data transfer between two drives and not within the same drive... I think thats confusing my question a bit.