TI 8.0 build 800 images & defrag

Hello All,

I have 8 images on a backup hard drive not in a Secure Zone. They are all logical drive images of data from different hard drives on the system (no Operating Sytems). The drive has become 23% fragmented. If I defrag the drive, will I mess up the images? They are all important backups between 20-30 GD, so I can't afford to screw them up. What do you think?

 

Defrag will not hurt the images.

 

Are you using the inbuilt Windows defragger or some other software?
I've never heard of the Microsoft Windows defrag software causing a problem however there is always the possibility of power glitch, disk or disk controller failure, etc.
If you can't risk losing these backup images make a copy to another disk.
Of course nothing is 100% guaranteed - three days ago I checked a disk used for storing backups (not TrueImage archives) which hadn't been accessed for over a year and found the disk to be corrupt. The disk is less than 3 years old. Western Digital diagnostics found the disk to be faulty. SpinRite 6 had to be run twice, first run fixed some data but stll found unrecoverable sectors, second run fixed more data resulting in no unrecoverable sectors but still reported some data as not correctable. The point is that the disk had deteriorated just sitting on a shelf - which highlights the need for a robust backup strategy for irreplaceable data.
Incidentally I usually run chkdsk to ensure the file system is intact before defragging any disk partition.