Course File Management

Editorial VIII: Moving and Copying a File

Transportation for your files

There will be times when you need to change the location of a file. You may want to copy it from one folder to another on a drive, or you may want to copy it from the hard drive to a diskette (or vice versa). Or you may simply want to move it to another location without making another copy of it. Moving and copying files from one place to another is relatively simple. However, a few warnings are in order:

If you are copying from the hard drive to a floppy diskette, watch out for the size of your files. Hard drives are large capacity storage areas. Diskettes will hold only 1.44 MB of data. For text files, this is usually not a problem, since they tend to be rather small. But, once you get into multimedia files (images, sound or video), you may have a serious problem since these files tend to be enormous (especially sound and video). Check the size of the file before you attempt to copy it onto a disk if you suspect it might be quite large. This is also true of PowerPoint presentation files -- they are enormous.
If your file is larger than 1.44 MB, you will need a Plan B. You can either zip the file (compress it) or save it onto a zip drive. We will not attempt either of these this summer, but you need to know that there are options for large files.

Moving vs. Copying

Moving a file means just that: you have one copy of a file that you remove from one location and place in another. You start out with one copy of a file and you end up with one copy of the file in a different place. When you drag and drop a file from one folder to another folder on the same drive, you are moving it. When you drag and drop a file from one drive to another, you are copying it. Copying a file means that you make a second copy of the same file and store it in a different location. You start out with one copy of a file and end up with two, each in a different location. In most cases, you will probably want to copy files rather than move them, but we will learn how to do both.

Watch the flying files ...

In the working demonstration that follows, you will learn the "drag and drop" method of copying files. We will see how to copy a file from the hard drive to a diskette and then we'll see the process in reverse, from the diskette to the hard drive.

Now it's your turn ...

Watch the working demonstration carefully, then perform the following tasks:

Copy the "test.doc" file from the "A" drive to your folder on the "C" drive.
Create a new document in Microsoft Word (just type the word "junk" in the body), save it as junk.doc onto your floppy. Then copy junk.doc into your personal folder on the hard drive.
Create a new folder on your floppy called "play." Then move the file junk.doc on your floppy to the folder called "play."