Jan. 5, 2005

Hi, All!

This Week: Be careful with Defrag!

The computer that I was working on in ComputerFAQ 220 (December 15, 2004) for which I had to erase the hard drive seemed to be working fine, and the client was busily entering data into the PC. However, she was told to run defrag after working on the PC to keep the hard drive clean-not a good idea.
True, your hard drive will fragment over time, but mostly as data is erased. When data is erased, it leaves holes where the data was, so after time, it is split up all over the hard drive. To help things run faster, defrag is run to put the files back together to make it easy for the PC to find all the parts of the files it needs. What defrag does is actually move files around to get them joined together. So each and every file is moved, and if anything happens during the defrag process, any or all files could be destroyed. That is what happened to this PC.
Somehow during defrag on this machine, one or more files were not written to the hard drive correctly and this caused Windows to crash. The only thing I could think to do was to reload Windows to restore the files that had been corrupted.
Yes, you should defrag your hard drive, but very seldom--not more than once a quarter if you use your PC a lot. And, not more than once a year if you don't do a lot of deleting of data. Email notes don't count, as email programs handle deleting differently.
Always back up your data files before you defrag so that you don't lose all the work you have done.

Have a happy New Year!

'Til next week, (ComputerFAQ#221)

Robert

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