Shallow Copy Duplicate as little as possible
whereas
Deep Copy duplicates everything.
Which means,
By using a shallow copy, two collections now share the individual elements. Whereas by using a deep copy, two individual collections are created with similar individual elements but not shared.
Using Shallow Copy
import copy
data2 = data1.copy()
Using Deep Copy
import copy
data2 = data1.deepcopy()Difference from Assignment
Assigning variables to objects is just adding another reference to the data object. It doesn't make any copy like shallow or deep.
Practical Usage or Applications
For immutable objects, there is no need for copying because the data will never change, so Python uses the same data; ids are always the same. For mutable objects, since they can potentially change, [shallow] copy creates a new object.
Deep copy is related to nested structures. If you have list of lists, then deepcopy copies the nested lists also, so it is a recursive copy. With just copy, you have a new outer list, but inner lists are references.
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