Defragmenting macs

[yadmonkey]

Won't cloning and restoring a fragmented drive result in a fragmented drive? Or perhaps I don't understand what you mean by "cleaning up your disk." By "clean," do you mean "defrag"?

I guess I left that a little vague on purpose because the point of my post wasn't to encourage defragging, but to say that Apple's "background defragging" isn't what many people think it is. But since you asked, here's what I do in the rare cases when I want to defrag a drive...

1. Update your backup.
2. Use Disk Utility to check for errors. This usually comes up clean, but not always.
3. Use Disk Warrior to check the directory for errors and repair any it finds. This is the most important part, IMO. A disk with directory errors could potentially run into trouble during a defrag. Once DW gives you a clean directory, you are much less likely to run into trouble from a defrag, unless your house is prone to power outages.
4. Use TTP or another utility to scan the drive for bad blocks. This is optional, but I like to do this once in a blue moon, which is about how often a defrag should be necessary.
5. Use SuperDuper to clone your drive to another drive and copy it back. Cloning in this way doesn't make a bit-by-bit copy... rather it reads a fragmented files and writes them in order. Your drive should have almost zero fragmentation and it can take a fraction of the time a defragger would take.

 

[Val-kyrie]

I guess I left that a little vague on purpose because the point of my post wasn't to encourage defragging, but to say that Apple's "background defragging" isn't what many people think it is. But since you asked, here's what I do in the rare cases when I want to defrag a drive...

1. Update your backup.
2. Use Disk Utility to check for errors. This usually comes up clean, but not always.
3. Use Disk Warrior to check the directory for errors and repair any it finds. This is the most important part, IMO. A disk with directory errors could potentially run into trouble during a defrag. Once DW gives you a clean directory, you are much less likely to run into trouble from a defrag, unless your house is prone to power outages.
4. Use TTP or another utility to scan the drive for bad blocks. This is optional, but I like to do this once in a blue moon, which is about how often a defrag should be necessary.
5. Use SuperDuper to clone your drive to another drive and copy it back. Cloning in this way doesn't make a bit-by-bit copy... rather it reads a fragmented files and writes them in order. Your drive should have almost zero fragmentation and it can take a fraction of the time a defragger would take.

Thanks for the clarification Makosuke and Yadmonkey. Most of my experience in cloning is with Acronis True Image 9 for Windows. If the hard drive is fragmented when the cloning starts, the new HDD is also fragged. This doesn't speak well of ATI's cloning utility in my opinion.

 

[MisterMe]

....

Not sure why you're getting into semantics. No, it does not clean a directory. Yes, it repairs them when possible. However, I fail to see why using the word clean warranted correction.

Generally, clean and repair have fundamentally different meaning. In the case of a directory, the term clean refers to the process of removing extraneous and unwanted files. You can clean a perfectly robust directory. The term repair generally means to fix corrupted pointers. DiskWarrior uses this process to recover files that you want to keep.

In summary: to clean means to remove unwanted files; to repair is the strategy used by DiskWarrior to recover wanted files.

 

[yadmonkey]

Well since you've gone the extra mile to correct something which didn't really need correcting, let's get technical... we're both wrong according to the Diskwarrior website

DiskWarrior is not a disk repair program in the conventional sense. Instead of patching the original directory, it uses a patent-pending technology to quickly build a new replacement directory using data recovered from the original directory, thereby recovering files and folders that you thought were lost and that no other program could recover.

Diskwarrior doesn't repair or clean - it rebuilds. However, I'm perfectly comfortable calling the new directory a clean directory - something which is desirable if you are going to use any method of defragmenting a drive. I'm crazy like that.