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Full Image Restore removes disk fragmentation????

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I only do Full Disk Images once a week and do so using the Emergency Boot Disk (actually on a USB stick) just to make sure that all files are closed and nothing gets by-passed.

I've always wondered if Full Images are copied on a file by file basis and, if such, would I be removing disk fragmentation by just doing a Full Image Restore.

I've asked this of the Acronis technical folks in the past but they've never dignified me with an acknowledgement of my question and much less a response.

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Astur, as far as I understand and based on other recent forum posts (about backup images being used for forensic recovery of data), the answer to your question is no.  Doing a full disk restore would not remove disk fragmentation as the backup image is created based on used sectors holding the data being backed up.

See forum topic: 127761: Sector by sector compression of unused space - lossless or lossy? for the full dialogue on this subject.

My information about this topic goes back several years when I was using Perfect Disk. Back then I could take an image of a badly fragmented disk and restore it to the same partition (for example, the entire C partition). After restoration the disk defragmenter showed no fragmentation whatsoever. That led me to conclude that TI was not doing the equivalent of the Linux command DD when restoring (making an exact restoration of each and every sector to the exact same location on the disk) but rather was restoring each file contiguously.

However, this should not be the case for a sector by sector restoration.

But like I said, that was maybe 10 years ago so my information may be outdated.