Defrag

[c_staub]

I am a newbie, so let me get this straight to defrag my internal drive I back-up all files to the external drive. Than boot up from the external drive. Use disk utility to erase the internal drive and use the restore feature to load it up again from the back up. I just wanted get that right before i continue on. Any help with this will be greatly appreciated

[dnanian]

You can do that, yes. Or you could use a program like iDefrag...

[brich]

However, whenever I've done a complete clone operation to external (not incremental), DiskWarrior shows the clone at 20-30% of the directory items 'out of place.' What is the significance of this? Is it a concern?

[dnanian]

Not a worry at all.

[brich]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Not a worry at all.

Dave, in your experience then, would you think it necessary to run DW after the initial clone, or would you simply disregard that 'out of place' %.

[Anith]

OK, I'm probably being a fool here, but I think DiskWarrior doesn't really have much to do with defragging, aside from the common computer maintenance theme.

Defragging deals with the fragmentation of files across the physical drive, due to a lack of consecutive free blocks. Mac OS X attempts to prevent this automatically, but depending on your usage your drive may become fragmented anyway (mine, for example is a mess). Defrag programs tend to take forever, so instead I use SuperDuper! to just copy, erase the original, and restore. As far as I know, however, SuperDuper! performs no repairs/optimizations on the directory structures of the drive.

DiskWarrior deals with directory damage and optimization. This isn't really related to disk fragmentation as far as I know. So I don't see why using SuperDuper! to defragment your disk woul affect your DiskWarrior usage patterns. I'd definitely do a quick runthrough of DiskWarrior on the drive before copying with SuperDuper!, to ensure my new, defragged drive is in perfect condition.

[dnanian]

In general, no -- I don't think it's necessary.