Defragment vs backup - format - restore ...

PoBoy

PoBoy

Herald
... this has bugged me for a long time. Is it better to defragment a drive, or to backup ( copy ) everything on the drive to another drive/partition, format the drive and then restore everything.

Defragmenting a drive really scares me, what if it fails mid-way, what if the power goes off, ...

And how do defragmenters really work ? If none of the files on a drive are open, it's ok. But what if some of the files are open ? Everytime I'm defragmenting the partition with windows I wonder if I'll be able to boot/use windows again !
 
somehow i feel this post should be either in os section or the general hardware section :)

dont worry, the os knows what's its doing, if you are too scared, back it up.
but all the years i have defragmented, it never crashed :)

the paging file is not touched during defragmentation from within os.

Is it better to defragment a drive, or to backup ( copy ) everything on the drive to another drive/partition, format the drive and then restore everything.
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are you saying you want to backup, reformat & restore, instead of just defragmenting :)
use ntfs, fragmentation is normal. degfragging is normal too.
about the power, what can i say :cheers: i do hope u r able to boot up, after such a catastrophe.
 
From what I seem to have read a while back most Defrag softwares keep a copy of a file whilst it is being defragged and moved to another location - I think all files that are being moved during the drefrag are 100% safe as no file is ever deleted till a copy is made in the new location...... I would wait for dipdude to confirm this.
 
Eazy said:
From what I seem to have read a while back most Defrag softwares keep a copy of a file whilst it is being defragged and moved to another location - I think all files that are being moved during the drefrag are 100% safe as no file is ever deleted till a copy is made in the new location...... I would wait for dipdude to confirm this.
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right on the mark, thats why on fat32 it was such a long drawn out process, those graphs were lovely to watch...:hap2:
 
dipdude said:
right on the mark, thats why on fat32 it was such a long drawn out process, those graphs were lovely to watch...:hap2:
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I ran FAT32 untill middle of last year - and the difference in Defragging the same 120gb drive was FAT32 = 5 hours.... same data NTFS = 20 Minutes !! :O

I ran FAT32 because at that time I was addicted to a DOS version of Ghost for my backups - ever since I moved to True Image I changed to NTFS.
 
dipdude said:
are you saying you want to backup, reformat & restore, instead of just defragmenting :)
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Errr ... I should have mentioned I'm still using Win Me ( and therefore fat32 ).

What I've done many times is to clone a partition ( using xxcopy ) on another partition, then format the partition, then clone back the partition. I thought it would be safer. Obviously, I couldn't do this with the Win partition.

Eazy said:
... From what I seem to have read a while back most Defrag softwares keep a copy of a file whilst it is being defragged and moved to another location ...
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That's ok if the file is not being used by a program or the os. What if the program wants to write to the file that's being defragged ? I normally terminate all programs before defragging, but I can't terminate the os processes. Doesn't windows write/update files ? That's what bothered me. Anyway, I don't know much about os internals. Guess I'll have to trust MS.

And, if any of you reading this post don't defrag regularly, please do. I hadn't defragged for a couple of months. After I did, I really noticed the improvement in response times ( even Win Explorer was taking ages to refresh after I deleted/renamed files ).
 
That's ok if the file is not being used by a program or the os. What if the program wants to write to the file that's being defragged ?
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the os would not allow that, as i told let the os take care of it, trust your win me or atleast microsoft :(
 
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