Patent ID: 7680980

Claim:
An image forming apparatus comprising: a scanner; a hard disk drive in which a region at which data is stored is divided into a plurality of regions by partitions; a pointer setting unit in which a first pointer used for storing image data generated on the basis of an image read by the scanner at one region of said plurality of regions, and a plurality of second pointers which are provided so as to correspond to the regions other than the one region in order to store data other than the image data at the regions other than the one region, are set; a pointer replacing unit configured to replace the first pointer with one of said plurality of second pointers at predetermined timings; an index number storage unit which stores an index number for each of said plurality of regions at which the data of the hard disk drive are stored; and an index number increasing unit configured to increase an index number corresponding to a region at which the image data has been stored using the first pointer after the first pointer is replaced with one of said plurality of second pointers, wherein the second pointer that is to replace the first pointer is selected from one or more of the second pointers corresponding to those regions whose index numbers are the smallest.