Hard copy

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For the television series, see Hard Copy.

In information handling, a hard copy is a permanent reproduction, or copy in the form of a physical object, of any media suitable for direct use by a person (in particular paper), of displayed or transmitted data. Examples of hard copy include teleprinter pages, continuous printed tapes, facsimile pages, computer printouts, and radio photo prints.

Magnetic tapes, diskettes, and non printed punched paper tapes are not hard copies.

[edit] "Dead tree edition"

Dead tree edition is a term referring to a printed paper version of an article, as opposed to digital alternatives such as a web page. It is a mildly deprecating term for hard copy; variations include dead tree format and dead-tree-ware. "Dead tree" refers to trees being cut down for raw material for producing paper. The Guardian website on 29 November 2006 printed:

"Maybe this is more a multimedia victory for Jeff Randall himself: he did manage a dead-tree front page, web scoop, vodcast and major plug on the 10 O'clock news."

A related saying among computer fans is "You can't grep dead trees", from the Unix command grep meaning to search the contents of text files. This means that an advantage of keeping documents in digital form rather than on paper is that they can be more easily searched for specific contents. An exception are texts stored as digital images (digital facsimile), as they cannot be easily searched, except by sophisticated means such as optical character recognition or examining the infrequently used image metadata. On the other hand, dead trees have tremendous data integrity in proper conditions.