The replication factor is a property that can be set in the HDFS configuration file that will allow you to adjust the global replication factor for the entire cluster. For each block stored in HDFS, there will be n – 1 duplicated blocks distributed across the cluster.

File conf/hdfs-site.xml is used to configure HDFS. Changing the dfs.replication property in hdfs-site.xml will change the default replication for all files placed in HDFS.

<name>dfs.replication<name> 
<value>3<value>

You can also change the replication factor on a per-file basis using the Hadoop FS shell.

To set the replication factor to 1 to all the files in a directory, you will need:

hadoop fs -setrep -w 1 -R /my/dir