Backup Strategy and Defragging Partitions

I have a home network with a large shared external drive. On that external drive (one large partition) I keep TONS of photos, music, videos, and many gigs of backup images.

I defrag regularly using JKDefrag (love it). But of course the primary source of fragmentation is adding new backup images and deleting old ones. I've realized that defragging the drive is giving it quite a workout on a recurring basis, and staying on top of it is time consuming.

Should I:

(1) repartition the drive so the backups reside on their own partition and never get defragged?

(2) leave the partitions alone but set JKDefrag to skip the backups?

(3) not defrag so much because the main source of fragmentation is the backups and I shouldn't worry about them?

 

I wouldn't keep photos, music and video on my harddisk.
I would keep such files on DVD's or CD's. These files are way too large.
The movie "Godfather-2" was 11+gb on my harddisk, that is the same size of my system partition without data. Pffft.

 

You can schedule backups.
Mrk

 

1. Use a good defragger such as Perfect Disk and you will need to defrag less often.

2. What backup programs are you using?

3. Backups should be in their own partition as they usually rarely need to be defragged. And backups should on drives separate from any files that are being backed up.

 

I really LIKE JKDegrag!

Paragon

I'm leaning towards setting up a partition just for backups, but I can't justify ANOTHER external drive just for images.