computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...

, file copying is the act of creating a new file such that it has the same content as an existing file. The operation is sometimes called ''cloning''. Generally, an

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

shell Shell may refer to: Architecture and design * Shell (structure), a thin structure ** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses Science Biology * Seashell, a hard outer layer of a marine ani ...

provides for file copying via commands cp, copy and similar variants. mv also copies files but only when the source and destination are on different file systems.

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

also provides includes the more advanced tools: Robocopy and xcopy. Many operating systems also provide for copying files via a

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

, such as a

file manager A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage computer files, files and folder (computing), folders. The most common Computer file#Operations, operations performed on files or groups of files incl ...

. It may provide for copy-and-paste and

drag-and-drop In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, it can be used to ...

user experience User experience (UX) is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person's perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. Improving user experience is important to most companies, designers, a ...

. Notable third-party utilities: * FastCopy *

Rclone Rclone is an open source, Multithreading (software), multi threaded, Command-line interface, command line computer program to manage or migrate content on cloud storage, cloud and other high Latency (engineering)#Packet-switched networks, laten ...

* RichCopy *

rsync rsync (remote sync) is a utility for transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and a storage drive and across networked computers by comparing the modification times and sizes of files. It is commonly found on Unix-like opera ...

* TeraCopy * Ultracopier

Shadow copy

Shadowing describes the process of maintaining a copy of a set of files, a.k.a. to

mirror A mirror, also known as a looking glass, is an object that Reflection (physics), reflects an image. Light that bounces off a mirror forms an image of whatever is in front of it, which is then focused through the lens of the eye or a camera ...

files in a separate physical location. Depending on the reasons behind the shadow operation, this location may be as close as the

BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is a type of firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization d ...

chip to the RAM modules or as far away as the other side of the

globe A globe is a spherical Earth, spherical Model#Physical model, model of Earth, of some other astronomical object, celestial body, or of the celestial sphere. Globes serve purposes similar to maps, but, unlike maps, they do not distort the surface ...

Remote copy

Some systems have specialized

system call In computing, a system call (syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system on which it is executed. This may include hardware-related services (for example, accessing a hard disk drive ...

s for copying files (like in

Windows API The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is the foundational application programming interface (API) that allows a computer program to access the features of the Microsoft Windows operating system in which the program is running. Programs can acces ...

), while others (like Unix-based and DOS) simply read the contents of the existing file into memory and write it to a new file. A specialized system call provides little advantage for files on local storage, but can optimize operation when the source and target files are on a remote

file server In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by workstations within a co ...

. The system call can tell the server to process the files on the server's file system; without sending file content over the network; thus greatly improving performance. Lacking such file server support, copying requires reading file content over the network, and sending it back over the network again. Sometimes, remote file copying is performed with a specialized command, like in DOS clients for

Novell NetWare NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the Internetwork Packet Exchange, IPX network protocol. The f ...

. The COPY command in some versions of

DR-DOS DR-DOS is a disk operating system for IBM PC compatibles, originally developed by Gary A. Kildall's Digital Research, Inc. and derived from Concurrent PC DOS 6.0, which was an advanced successor of CP/M-86. Upon its introduction in 198 ...

since 1992, has built-in support for this. An even more complicated situation arises when one needs to copy files between two remote servers. The simple way is to read data from one server, and then to write the data to the second server.

References

External links

for

Emacs Emacs (), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:File Copying Computer file systems Copyright law

Shadow copy

Remote copy

See also

References

Further reading

External links