Differences between File Copy and Sector Copy

As the internet becomes more and more convenient, international trade among different countries becomes more and more popular. However, such kind of business mostly depends on the internet to communicate and computers to store vital information. Just imagine that, one day, your business contracts, emails, client database as well as some other important information were lost. Are you sure you can restore them and be back in business soon? Consequently, it is too late to regret that you did not have a back-up in advance.

 

However, we can not always avoid data loss. Sometimes, we delete some specific files by accident or failure; sometimes we lose data because of a hard disk failure as well as virus infection; sometimes our computer even will be stole by others.

Usually, we do simple backup such as file copy like copy and paste. This is fine as long as there are no problems with the file system on the original disk. But as soon as the copy in progress finds a file which can’t be copied (for whatever reason, file system corruption say) the copy process stops. Leaving you with the time consuming and rather mundane task of trying to workout where and why the file copy stopped and what files remain to be copied.

Have you ever heard of sector copy?

In the context of computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of a track (a physical division of data in a disk drive) on a magnetic disk or optical disc. Each sector stores a fixed amount of data. The typical formatting of these media provides space for 512 bytes (for magnetic disks) or 2048 bytes (for optical discs) of user-accessible data per sector. Mathematically, the word sector means a portion of a disk between a center, two radii and a corresponding arc, shaped like a slice of a pie. Thus, the common disk sector actually refers to the intersection of a track and mathematical sector.

During file copy, we can only assure that the contents between copy and original file is the same. However, in sector copy, just as its name implies, it is sector by sector copy. Meanwhile, the location of the sector on the destination sectors is exactly the same as the original one, which is the main difference between file copy and sector copy.

 

We have indicated that file copy will stop if there is an error in the original one in the passage before. However, sector copy will solve such kind of problem. It will copy all the sectors to the destination sectors even there are some errors. In this way, we can get a full back up and carry on data recovery later on if needed.

Besides, it’s better for you to know that copying sector is much faster than copying separate files and folders.

To sum up, I think you can see which one is more practical.