Which is faster - copy or move?

wet-paint

If I have tens of gigs of files to move, is it faster to copy from one place to another and then delete the original, or to move the orginal file?

Cheers,
WP

Stephen

If you are moving from one location to another on the same disk then move is infinitely faster. If you're moving from one physical disk to another they're much the same. I would copy if doing this, just in case something happened to cause the data to get trashed during the move.

Yakuza

As far as I can recall, most OSes treat a move on the same hard drive by altering the entries in the file allocation table (or equivalent) rather than physically moving the file, so your file still occupies the same sectors that it did before, and it's very fast to implement.

liamo

If you're moving to a different location within the same Filesystem then the physical location of the file doesn't move on the disk. Only the directory entries are modified.

If you are copying between filesystems (eg a different partition on the same disk, or on a different disk) then a move consists of a copy then a delete of the original.

I'd echo what Stephen said: if you're moving between filesytems, it's safer to do the copy and then delete as separate operations yourself.

Regards,

Liam

Khannie

Yakuza wrote:

As far as I can recall, most OSes treat a move on the same hard drive by altering the entries in the file allocation table (or equivalent) rather than physically moving the file

This is (more or less) bang on. A move on the same filesystem moves nothing in the file itself. It's an easy (and hefty) performance gain.

Stephen wrote:

just in case something happened to cause the data to get trashed during the move.

No need for this. A move across two filesystems is accomplished by a verified copy then delete. Unless you're concerned that the filesystem you're moving to is unstable (e.g. dodgy hard drive), in which case you'd just be copying anyway.

jor el

Total Copy is a handy little utility when moving/copying large amounts of data, offers a few extra features, when you decide whether to move or copy & delete that is.

Lump

If Moving within the same drive it happens instantly. If you copy within the same drive, it takes the same time as moving/copying to a different drive.

John