Moving files from one drive to another

[tomhansonphotography]

<p>Question of the day...sorry to take your time!<br>

When I am moving jpeg pix from one hard drive to another do I deminish the quality of the image as I would if I was "saving" the image after editing? OR, will it transfer clean without damage?</p>

<p>Thansk for your help as always.</p>

[Ed_Ingold]

<p>Copying a file in this way has no effect, since it is a one to one transfer. "Saving" a file, from Photoshop for example, involves a recompression step.</p>

[Charles_Webster]

<blockquote>

<p>"Saving" a file, from Photoshop for example, involves a recompression step.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Only if you are resaving it as a JPEG. If you resave it as PSD or TIFF, no recompression is applied, and no degradation takes place.</p>

<p><Chas><br /></p>

[tomhansonphotography]

<p>Thanks<br>

I am moving a bunch of stuff to an external hard drive so I can fee up some spaec on my computer hd. Thanks for the feedback. Tom</p>

[mendel_leisk]

<p>Digital copying is kind of like classical music: the notes are the same, through the centuries. It doesn't matter how many times a piece is transcribed or reprinted, the end result is identical. Well, barring an inadvertant error or "interpretation" in the transfer.</p>

[JAPster]

<p>Edward is correct. Simply doing a drag-n-drop copy of files & folders from one drive to another does not degrade the file contents. Nor does it improve the file contents. It simply moves the files from A to B. One additional step I do is right-click on the 'old' folder and select Properties from the menu. Do the same on the new folder. Then use the 2 properties screens to compare against each other, making sure that the # FILES, # FOLDERS, and SIZE IN BYTES are the same. This confirms that the new folder location on the 2nd hard drive has same # files, folders, and bytes as the original. Do this before you blow away the original copy on the old hard drive.</p>

[mark_poseley]

<p>From bitter experience I highly recommend you copy the files over then delete the original...</p>

<p>We are talking about a computer here and power glitches, OS hiccups, and other unplanned foibles can corrupt data or interrupt the move causing loss.</p>

[tomhansonphotography]

<p>Thanks so much for your help with this. I am becoming concerned that these small WD hard drives wont hold up over time and that I should find some on line storage. The problem I have is the idea that the online storage company may simply go out of business and dump all the pictures at some point. In the last year or so I remember a company doing that. Any thoughts?</p>

[mendel_leisk]

<p>The trouble with online is speed and capacity: too slow and low methinks.</p>

<p>Any drive <em>will</em> fail, just bear that in mind and proceed accordingly. My ploy is to always have my data files on two internal drives. Barring something catastrophic, like a power surge, or theft, or fire, that's pretty safe.</p>

<p>The odds of two drives failing at the same time are very low. And to deal with power surge/theft/fire, I do fairly dilligent double backup to DVD's, with one off-site.</p>

[tomhansonphotography]

<p>I think I may need to start a DVD backup program. BUT will that deminish quality?</p>

[mendel_leisk]

<p>Nope, with one caveat: you need to use quality disks with a good longevity record, use a decent burner, and set your burning software to <em><strong>verify</strong></em> the files after burn. This last step will uncover most issues at the start, rather than you find out down the road that your disk's data is no good.</p>

<p>At least with the first one or two, copy the files back from the disk to your hard drive: make sure you can come full circle, the files are still ok.</p>

<p>Nero's a respected name, and Roxio does more or less the same functions. Both programs <em>bury</em> the simple data disk burning function in a suite. With Nero the function you want to use is "Nero Burning ROM".</p>

[mendel_leisk]

<p>Something I've found invaluable when doing DVD's: maintain a log, with disk names, first file/last file, etc. This can be hand written, or a .txt format, simple text file.</p>

[tomhansonphotography]

<p>Thank you very much for your help.<br>

Tom</p>

[tom_yin]

<p>Mendel,<br>

I agree that a log with file names can be very useful and it is frustrating that Microsoft doesn't provide this utility. I'm not sure if Macs can or not. But if you are running Windows XP, there is a pretty easy way to get a list of the contents of a file or folder. See the following site to get instructions for doing this simply in XP:<br>

http://www.theeldergeek.com/file_list_generator.htm<br>

Unfortunately I just had to switch to Vista and haven't found an easy way to do this yet.</p>

<p> </p>