A: Nondestructive editing refers to the ability of a digital recorder to copy the information on a hard disk without actually duplicating the data on the hard disk. Pointers are used to keep track of which audio should be played at the appropriate time. This provides a more efficient use of disk space.
For example, if you were to copy a track on a hard disk recorder without nondestructive editing that required 20 MB of storage space and added that to the original, the new track would require 40 MB of storage space. By using nondestructive editing you could do that same copy on a DR8/DR16 without filling up the additional 20MB of storage.