What does hardcopy and softcopy mean

By: Justin Stoltzfus Contributor, Reviewer. By: Satish Balakrishnan. Dictionary Dictionary Term of the Day. Natural Language Processing. Techopedia Terms. Connect with us. Sign up. Term of the Day. Best of Techopedia weekly. News and Special Offers occasional. When a document is created on a computer, it is typically saved as a file on the computer's hard drive.

This is sometimes referred to as a soft copy. While the file can be easily opened and edited on a computer, it can also be easily deleted. Therefore, sometimes printing a hard copy is done to create a physical backup of the document. The definition of Hard Copy on this page is an original TechTerms.

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Hard Copy : Hard copy refers to the digital document file which is printed on paper or other material like transparency. In hard copy the output is printed on the paper and sometimes it is referred as permanent copy.

We can touch the hard copy. We can say it is a physical copy. For example- News Paper, Book, Note book, printed document files etc. Soft Copy : Soft copy refers to the digital document file or electronic version of a document which is not printed on paper. In soft copy the output is present in the USB drives and computers etc and sometimes it is referred as temporary copy. We can not touch the soft copy.

We can say it is a virtual copy.