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ATIH and defrag

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Should I only ever defrag a backup source HDD before a Full (in other words, never before Incrementals)?   (With ATIH2017 I do not enable "Back up sector-by-sector".)

Should I never defrag the HDDs I dedicate 100% to storing backup images?

(The above was what I always did with Norton Ghost.  And one reason I dedicate backup target drives 100% to that purpose.)

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Coyote, with Windows 8.1, 10 and on, there is a lot less need for defragmentation than there was in earlier versions of Windows.

Windows maintenance will automatically take care of fragmentation where needed.

If you are going to do defragmentation, then doing so before a Full backup would be the best timing as this will increase the size of incremental or differential backups.

You probably shouldn't need to defrag your backup storage drive as the file sizes will cause some potential fragmentation on their own.  The approach I have take is to do backup to different backup destinations and then do a full format on any fragmented drive to start a new fresh set of backups to that, as this tends to be faster than defragmenting a drive with very large files stored.

SSD drives should not normally need to be defragmented.

Thank you very much for the great reply, Steve!

I will soon be using ATIH2018 on a Win7 system.  I do realize that defrag is relatively unnecessary, and usually don't do it, I'm afraid that the one exception has been before Fulls since I know that after them I won't be able to (and I find it psychologically hard to resist doing something I soon won't be able to; I know this is irrational, perhaps I can get a grip on this compulsion from now on).

I guess Windows' maintenance defrag hasn't been a problem, since my system drive incrementals are small enough.