When I store files in HDFS, will they be replicated?

Question

I am new to Hadoop.

When I store Excel files using hadoop -fs put commoad, it is stored in HDFS.

Replication factor is 3.

My question is: Does it take 3 copies and store them into 3 nodes each?

Answer 1

Here is a comic for HDFS working.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-zw6KHOtbT4MmRkZWJjYzEtYjI3Ni00NTFjLWE0OGItYTU5OGMxYjc0N2M1/edit?pli=1

Answer 2

Does it take 3 copies and store them into 3 nodes each.

answer is: NO

Replication is done in pipelining that is it copies some part of file to datanode1 and then copies to datanode2 from datanode1 and to datanode3 from datanode1

http://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r1.2.1/hdfs_design.html#Replication+Pipelining

see here for Replication Pipelining