Defrag Question

S

saxman72

New member
Okay,
So I'm still kinda new to this hard disk recording thing.

My main question is this: Should I back up my drives before defraging them? Or is it perfectly safe to just go ahead and do it?... Bear in mind I have almost a year's worth of stuff on these drives.

My second and possibly more complicated question is this: If I need to reformat my drives and re-install everything, is it better to put the valuable data on a CD-R, or a CD-RW? Is there any difference in terms of error possibilities?... and is one copy safe enough before wiping out the drives?

It's looking more and more like I'm gonna have to do this so I'd like to be as informed and educated as possible!

Thanks everyone! This place is full of valuable info!

saxman72 (from the dark ages of digital tape!)
 
I never had any problems with lost data due to defragmentation but I wouldn't swear that it 100% safe. Nothing is when you're dealing with computers. I don't back up before a defragmentation though. If you have important stuff on the disk, you need a backup anyway but not because of the defrag.

I always check the data on CDRs on another machine before wiping the disk. I don't think there is a consequent difference in quality between CDR and CDRW.

Good luck

/Ola
 
Holy Defrag Saxman!
Are you saying you haven't defragged in a year?
Thats a good way to have your computer come to a grinding
halt. Your read/write head must be jumping for joy looking for data after a years worth of data deletion and moving. It needs to be contiguous so the head doesnt have to jump around looking for data.
If your using your computer on a regular basis for recording I would make plans to defrag once a week
just to keep things running smooth. It also speeds it up because it takes less time looking for data.
Defrag doesn,t delete data it just puts it back in order so
the read/write head can find it faster. Usually you cant defrag if there are errors on the drive. You have to run scandisk or run a chkdsk to fix the errors before it will defrag. This is with win95. Win98 and Win2000 I dont know.

Duck
 
Anti-virus

If you have an anti-virus program, it will exponentially increase the amount of time it takes to defrag. As a result of not having defragged in a year the process may take a couple of hours. Disable the anti-virus program or it could take more than twice as long. Without it my system take 5-10 minutes, with anti-virus running it take over an hour.
 
Listen to Ola. Any data loss you encounter will be due to simple HD failure which has absolutely NOTHING to do with performing the defrag function. Your HD is going to die and lose all of its data at some point in its life. Prepare for this; don't let it ruin your life or rule your life. However: If you're just creating and modifying only large .wav files I don't think you'll accomplish much defragging the drive. Do it once in a while after you've backed up and wiped your drive. That's the only time I'd ever fart around with that. At work where I'm dealing with a different file population it's a different story. Lots of small files...
 
I Disagree with Drstawl or as far as I can tell by his wording. A simple hard drive failure can be caused by not defragging. A few years back I worked on a computer in a hospital where no one told them about defragmentation. They used the computer for over a year till it stopped working.
I asked the persons who used it if they defragged and they did not know what it was. I used a boot disk and was able to start the defrag. I had to use spinrite and go through the whole drive and had to move the boot sector to another cluster because it was damaged. Anyone who has done this knows its not a good idea to move the boot. This was all due to not defragmenting the drive.
As Drstawl said though if your creating large files then you wont have to defrag as much. If You delete a lot of text files etc. you will have to do it more. If you have a dedicated hard drive just for your audio files and then delete them its not a biggie. But if you use it for the internet,word processing, pic files etc. then you need to do it more. You cant hurt your computer defragging but you can if you dont. If your computer starts to get sluggish then it may be time to defrag.

Duck
 
doc is right if you have a drive dedicated just to audio. I often go through and delete files (takes that I'm not using) to free up space, after that I will defrag. It takes about an hour I think to defrag my 20GB drive, but I don't really know cuz I usually just leave it and take a nap or something. :D

-jhe
 
Well Duck- I've seen someone just use up all the bytes on their HD and have the thing freeze at that point. I wouldn't chalk this failure up to HD failure or lack of defrag.
Just not takin' out the garbage.
Bottom line. Do it if it's necessary but don't expect it to ward off death by natural causes.
 
All I am going to say is this - if you have not backed up your hard drive in over a year, DO IT NOW! Yes I agree that regular defraging is a good thing. But regular backups are far more important. If it seems like a hassle, ask yourself this - "what would I do tomorrow if I turned on the PC and it went FFFFFZZZZZZZZZPPPPTTTTTT........?"
 
Thanks everybody,

I did both the back-up and defrag last night. I'll sleep a little easier now. Hopefully I'll get my 'puter to run better too. Thanks to all for the info!

saxman72
 
If you have 2 drives it's faster to just to move the data to another drive and quick format the old one. Defrag will hang at 10% for hours on large drives. No need to defrag if you have a fast method of bringing your system up from scratch. As ola says, backup. CD-RW disks are a waste of money. What kinda backup media is it if it can be erased? I feel much safer backing up to something that can't be overwritten.
 
dobro: mp3 files that didn't skip/hickup prior to the defrag do so afterwards, zip archives are no longer extractable, some program errors, etc.

Not all files/programs, but many do seem to be affected.

Maybe my hard drive sucks or something. But if I don't defrag, I get no problems. So dunno...
 
I love RWs for other things... Like testing out mixes in my car and other places... and taking flyers to kinkos... and stuff.

xoxoxo
 
Camn - I thought RW's could only be read by RW drives. I've been burning CDR's to test mixes. It would be a lot more economical to brun RW's and then reuse them.

Emeric - Can't most backup media can be erased or overwritten - tape, Zipdrive, Jazz, etc? This is a capability I would think that you would want, so you can do periodic backups without having to buy new media each time. Even business systems are backed up on tape. The business I used to work for did daily backups using 5 individual tapes (Mon - Fri). The following week you used the same 5 tapes all over again.
 
dachay2tnr, from what I've heard, *some* cd players can read CD-RW media. I haven't been so lucky though.

It would be nice wouldn't it?
 
dachay2tnr: I was referring to CD-R vs CD-RW media. But yeah sure, tape of zip's are used over and over. I just feel safer having something locked in. A tape backup would nice to have though. Been checking out the HP colorado 8GB's, slow but I bet more predictable than burning. Could fit 10 songs of unmixed raw audio data on a $40 cartridge for intermediate backups.



[Edited by Emeric on 10-24-2000 at 10:13]
 
I have had contact with literally hundreds of PCs and I have never encountered a case of Defrag causing file corrution unless the drive was already bad. If you are suspicious run a surface scan with Scandisk or a similar disk tool before defraging. And I am not familiar with a drive getting stuck at 10% either, although obviously large hard drives that are full of data will take a long time to defrag. In a situation like that I just let it run overnight - depending on your OS you can set a schedule to do this automaticly. It IS a good idea to disable your anti-virus software before defraging (assuming you have it set to check every file you access).

Have to say I have not be a big user of CD-RWs, with CDRs so cheap its easier to use them and just toss them once they are no longer needed. The few times I have used them they have been unreadable by any non-CDRW drive. But for testing mixes they would seem to make sense.
 
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