Defarg after backup

[mardjk]

Hello, I am having a problem Defraging after a backup with Acronis home 11, it will stick on 10 percent and not move, after reading the manual for Acronis, it said a backup would invalidate the integrity of the backup, so it would seem the solution would be not to defag or optimize after a backup. I have a external USB WD 250 drive formated in NTFS that I use exclusively for backing up my main drive, but I do have a few gigabytes of files and programs that I keep there as a 3rd place for backup. My question is, I am now cutting the few gigabytes of supplemental backup I have and pasting it to my main drive to defrag, which seem to create an extra step, and may be unnecessary, as there may be a short cut, or I may just be doing something wrong. It seems strange that a backup up drive cannot be defragged or optimized. I am currently running a system with an AMD 64 X2 4400 with a nVidia XT 6800 GDDR3 256 meg card and 4 gigabytes of PC 2700 memory, which only 3200 can be read because of the 32 bit limitation. Any help would be appreciated in the help with this delema. Note: the same results were on a internal SATA WD 500 drive.

[Clayton]

Hello mardjk,

 

I also have a Western Digital external USB harddrive and I have defragged it (and optimized) several times with SmartDefrag; I have had no issues and no corruption of integrity on that drive whatsoever.

 

I think what Acronis is warning you of is the issue that is common to all external drives. There is occasionally a misread or write of data when transfering/moving data using USB to an external.

 

Since it is your backup drive, there really is no need to optimize it at all since you don't really need slightly quicker file access. Of course, I cannot say for sure whether or not your data will become corrupted entirely or partially (if any at all). So really it is up to you if you want to defrag your backup drive.

[mardjk]

Hard drive and Defragging

 

Clayton, thanks for your quick response. Is your OP Vista? If you are using the same OP and have the same external hard drive as me, then I have other issues to work out. Not big ones, as you said; the drives sole job is to backup, but I do have a couple of gigs of current files that are there as a third backup. I also had to drop from a 11 percent overclock to a 9 percent and tweek the memory timing due Vista crashing when optimizing with iObit, just differences between XP and Vista.

[Clayton]

I use Windows XP as my Operating System. I'm not sure that really matters since SmartDefrag would function much the same way in Vista as it does in XP. Likewise the file system is still NTFS so there should not be any issues. If you have 2 other backups (you said the external HD was your third backup) then you may as well go ahead and attempt to defragment. If any problems arise, you can always recopy that backup from one of the other 2 sources.

 

I think I should also tell you that I use my external as a backup using only windows explorer. I don't use any programs like Norton Ghost or Acronis so I'm not sure if the backup would become corrupted. If Acronis advised you not to do it, you probably shouldn't. Then again, if you feel you really need to and you have the means to get that data back should a problem arise, you may as well go ahead and do it.