git clone vs copy paste, what's the difference?

Question

as stated in the subject

note: the git clone i mean is the git clone without any option, the one which is performed by doing "git clone /C:/my_origin_folder"

Answer 1

This answer of mine regarding backup should give you some answer on clone vs copy: Moving a git repo to a second computer?

Main differences:

1. When you clone, you get remote origin setup pointing to original repo, so that you can push to it.
2. You don't get hooks and reflog ( and also old objects) and other remotes when you clone but you do when you copy

Note that when you clone with a folder path, the differences change subtly, as the objects and refs are usually just copied / hardlinked ( equivalent of --local which is the default with local folder paths)

Answer 2

When you use git clone instead of copy paste, the original repository will be the origin.

Besides, when cloning on the same machine you can use --local to make it faster. From the manual page:

--local, -l

When the repository to clone from is on a local machine, this flag bypasses the normal "git aware" transport mechanism and clones the repository by making a copy of HEAD and everything under objects and refs directories. The files under .git/objects/ directory are hardlinked to save space when possible....