can moving a file alot corrupt it?

[DeadPark121]

well, in the last few years, i've upgraded my hard drive a few times, and i'm wondering about something.

all the files started on a 20gig drive, moved to a 100 gig, then to a 500 gig, then to a 750 gig, back to the 500 gig, eventually to a 1 Tb and in the next few years it will probably move some more.

so i'm worried, when i move the file, does it slowly corrupt the files? and eventually it'll be unreadable? or does the computer usually do a perfect copy and i have nothing to worry about?

[JohnVV]

you will if you but a file larger than 4 gig on a fat32 formated partition

but ext 3 to ext3 or ext 4 then no they will not be corrupted. except for the normal errors if the system crashes while copping . or if the new disk is bad .There is always a slim- to - none chance that something might happen .

[RupertPupkin]

Short answer: no.

[DeadPark121]

^_^ that's good to hear. i was thinking of it like a regular copy machine, if you make a copy of a copy, the quality gets worse and worse until there's nothing left to copy

i'm glad to hear computers don't work like that.

[Firewing1]

If you really want to be sure, run "rsync" on your data after the copy has finished. If you supply the "-u" flag, it uses a nice algorithm that will determine if any files differ, and if so, copy the required changes. So although it is very unlikely your files get corrupted as they transfer, if something does go wrong then rsync will pick up the difference and correct it for you.

[aleph]

I think if your machine is not using ECC memory chips, there could be a chance of one-bit errors going undetected and uncorrected, which could lead to funny things incl. error in file copy. However I don't really have an estimation of the probability of this..