Does move files between folders by hold and drag safe ?

[Randa Ranoosh]

I have some folders with 100s of gb I want to move them to on other folder in same drive if I copy and paste it will take hours but does moving by hold and drag safe for windows and does not cause any damage to windows or registry and how it can move big files in seconds by hold and drag while copy and paste take hours

why if I copy and paste it will take long time to copy 100 gb while holde and drag takes only seconds

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

Just don't move system files or folders.

 

[glamdringfh]

You should be fine holding and dragging. It won't damage the operating system.

Edit **As Blackbird noted, don't move your Windows core system files or your operating system will not function properly**

It takes a long time to copy/ paste because you are making duplicates of the data, not just moving it. Drag and dropping within the same drive isn't copying the files, it is simply moving them to a different place.

If you are using a HDD drive moving big files around can fragment your drive pretty significantly, so after moving around large files it is recommended to defragment your drive to keep it running as quickly as possible.

 

[gondo]

It's how the OS works and how the file system is designed on the OS. If you copy and paste it physically has to write the folder all over again on the hard drive. Where as moving the folder just rewrites the pointers in the file allocation table. Do a test with cut and paste vs copy and paste and see the speed difference.

Imagine this 20 years ago in lamens terms. With windows you had a bunch of 10k files on the disk drive in a row. Delete one of those files in the middle creating a 10k void. Now create a 20k file. What happens is the first 10k gets put in the void and the next 10k at the end. This is called fragmentation is slows things down tremendously. Over time of creating, deleting, moving files, things become a mess. You need to defragment using software to line things up.

With Unix/Linux all files get written in order one after the other. There is a file table that points to where the file is on the drive. If you move a file it just changes the file table pointer. That's one reason why linux was so efficient. Drive never fragmented.