recopy

Recopy is the act of copying something again. It can refer to duplicating a document, an image, a dataset, or any other artifact. The term combines the prefix re- with copy and is used as a verb, as in “to recopy a manuscript” or “to recopy a hard drive.”

In everyday use, recopy may occur when the original is damaged, lost, or needs to be reformatted for a different medium. In offices, a copier or scanner may produce multiple recopies of a document, with quality depending on device settings and media.

In computing and data management, recopy describes duplicating data from a source to a target location. This is common in backups, data migrations, and integrity checks. Recopying can ensure redundancy but may be inefficient if full copies are unnecessary; practices such as incremental backups, versioning, and data deduplication can reduce the need for repeated recopying.

In digital media workflows, recopying a file with different encoding, compression, or metadata settings may affect fidelity. Verification methods like checksums or hashes help confirm that copies are equivalent to the source.

Potential drawbacks include wasted storage, maintenance overhead, and the risk of drift between copies if records are not synchronized. The concept remains central to strategies for data preservation, archival practices, and document management.

See also: copy, duplication, backup, replication, imaging.