Is It OK TO Defrag a Drive With an Image On It?

I dont know where I heard this but someone said you should not defragment a drive that has an disk restore image on it. I would have thought restoring an image would work better if its was defragged rather in many pieces on the disk. Any thoughts?

 

In theory, defragging an image file should not affect it at all … however …
there are those who claim to have had trouble after doing so. Why press your luck.
Defragging an image file will probably provide no noticeable improvement while restoring.

 

You could defrag the destination drive before making a backup and see if your defragger can optimize the free space so that your TIB file won't be fragmented on creation.

 

Restoring an image requires about 1 minute per gigabyte of data. Defragging is unlikely to make any practical difference that you would notice on a task taking several minutes. There is a good chance that you will never use the image or if you do it will be on very rare occassions, so why bother. This is quite different from the case of some Windows files that are accessed many times a day.

Defragging the HD first is the better way to go about it. If you do defrag the HD with your images on it, run the TI valdiate routine on them after. This will show if they can be properly read after defragging by virtue of recreating and comparing the many checksums included in the file.

 

I have never defragged my backup storage area. Even If I felt like doing it it can't be done because it is a secure zone and cannot be touched by a defragger. It has been actively used for thousands of images and many hundreds of restores.

I can however confirm that a lack of defragging makes no difference at all to the speed of creating or restoring backup images. Over a period of years the GB per minute performance has remained the same.

There has also been only small speed changes between TI Versions, I have not kept my notes from way back but I seem to remember that version 8 performed the best on my computer. Version 11 had a glimmer of being a tiny bit faster than Version 10 by I rejected it for other reasons.


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If you are after a signifigant speed increase over the whole image restore cycle find yourself some extra hard drive storage, if possible on a secondary internal drive, then turn off compression.
The speed increase is more apparent on slower/older computers.

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