When I defrag my drives (initiated by Norton 360) all the drives are defragged.

Does this damage the destination image of the original drive created by Ghost?

Or perhaps the contents of an image cannot be repositioned by defragging

Regards.....

Noel,

I don't think it does any damage to the images but it is a waste of time. I don't defrag my destination drives.

Many thanks Brian.

I guess you've the best plan!

Recently, my Storage drive, where I keep my Ghost backup Image Files, was an unholy mess.  Fragments all over the place.  A MS Defrag would have done the job, but would have taken hours. (Heck, maybe days!)

I elected to use another drive for a scratch drive.  I used Ghost to make an image of my Storage drive to the scratch drive and then I did an immediate Restore of that Image, back onto the storage drive (partition).

My storage drive was totally re-written with NO spaces or fragmentation.  Now it's as neat as a pin,,,,,so to speak.

I defragment my C: drive the same way.  Ghost Rocks!

Cheers Mates!
OC  8-)

@ OldCasper


OldCasper wrote on Jan 17^th, 2011 at 12:35pm:

My storage drive was totally re-written with NO spaces or fragmentation.Now it's as neat as a pin,

I see this as a disadvantage. Ghost 2003 can't do a sector based restore and restore the sectors as they were positioned when the image was created. Defragmentation apps use various methods to arrange data for optimal performance and to limit further defragmentation. Perfect Disk for example uses  "SMARTPlacement". Boot files are arranged first in the partition followed by rarely, occasionally and recently modified files. The MFT is placed in the middle of the data and the page /hibernation files are placed in the middle of the partition.  A Ghost 2003 restore would destroy this data positioning.

OldCasper wrote on Jan 17^th, 2011 at 12:35pm:

I used Ghost to make an image of my Storage drive to the scratch drive and then I did an immediate Restore of that Image, back onto the storage drive (partition). My storage drive was totally re-written with NO spaces or fragmentation.

Yeah, I agree that's a convenient side-benefit of Ghost--the restore is de facto unfragmented and compacted.  It also does a tidier job than the Windows defragmenter, which can leave holes.

For a data partition you can also achieve the same result by merely dragging the contents to your scratch drive, quick-formatting the data partition, then dragging the contents back.

Brian wrote on Jan 17^th, 2011 at 2:00pm:

I see this as a disadvantage.

OTOH, OldCasper *was* talking about a data partition, which I don't think would be subject to the same issues as an OS partition.




Quote:

Defragmentation apps use various methods to arrange data for optimal performance and to limit further defragmentation.

Brian, do you know if the Windows defragmenter is that sophisticated?  IMHE, all parts of my OS partition gradually get fragmented, so it seems to me I don't see much evidence that rarely used files are placed near the front.

Dan Goodell wrote on Jan 17^th, 2011 at 2:25pm:

do you know if the Windows defragmenter is that sophisticated?

Dan, I'm sure it's not. A few years ago I was using Diskeeper with Ghost 10. Diskeeper was set to manual mode but every few days the size of my Ghost incremental image would suddenly jump for no particular reason. I looked at the Diskeeper graphic and a large chunk of data had been repositioned. The number of fragmented files was not less than a few days before so I assumed a defragmentation hadn't occurred. Just data movement. I subsequently changed to Perfect Disk and the incrementals stopped jumping in size and there was no more data movement. I'm now using IFW and if I don't install any apps my differential images are only 30 MB in size one month after the last base image, so there is negligible data movement.

I haven't checked for a few years but I think Diskeeper used to organize files in the opposite placement to Perfect Disk. I've never been convinced that Perfect Disk makes my OS work better but it certainly minimizes data movement and keeps differential images small.

Edit... I defrag and create a base image monthly.