Windows 8 Bible

Moving and Copying Files

Many reasons exist for moving and copying files. If you’ve been saving files in a willy-nilly manner, you may want to move them around into folders that make more sense so they’re easier to find. Or, if you end up with hundreds or thousands of files in a folder and you get sick of looking through all their names, you might want to create some subfolders and then move some of those files into subfolders.

If you have a bunch of files on external disks, you may want to copy them to your hard disk where they’re easier to get to and work with. Or, if you need to send files to someone whose e-mail account has file-size limits, you might want to copy some files to an external disk to put in the mail. Then again, you may want to copy some files to an external disk as a backup, just in case some mishap damages the copy on your hard disk.

Whatever your reason for moving or copying files, the techniques are the same. First, understand that there is a difference between moving and copying. The words mean the same things they do in English. When you move a file from one place to another, you still have only one instance of the file. It’s just in the new location rather than the old location. When you copy a file, you end up with two instances: the original in the original location and an exact copy in the new location.

Moving and copying usually involves two locations. These locations may be two different folders in the same drive, or two entirely different drives. ...