Defrag of hard drive

Its hard to tell by the wording in your post, but I'm going to assume you have backed up only one partition, namely C: The short answer to your question is anything you do to your partition will not affect the backup copy (with the exception of resizing the partition smaller so that the backup will no longer fit back into the resized partition). The whole point of making a backup is so you can restore the partition back to its state at the time the backup was made, so by definition it is not affected by anything you do later on. If you ever decide to restore the partition with your current backup then the defragging will be lost, so do another backup after the defragging if you want.

The frequency of backups is an individual call, its up to you to decide how often to do it based on your own needs. Keep some older versions around because you sometimes find problems weeks or even months after they occurred.

Read some of the general info on this forum for suggestions, such as separating your system and data onto different partitions. Also move e-mail to the data partition. The idea is to keep your system installation only on C: and keep it as small as possible for several reasons: 1) its faster to backup, 2) you can fit more backups on a given drive size, 3) your system will run better, 4) it won't change very often, so you won't have to do as many system backups. Put all your data, etc. on one or more additional partitions that you can backup independently of your C: partition. Unless you delete a lot of data files regularly, with data its usually not necessary to go back very far in time if you need to recover something, so you won't need a lot of history in the data partition backups. Again, its very dependent on how you use your system, everybody is different so you have to make the call based on your own system usage characteristics.

Doug Walby,

Thank you so much for your reply. I agree with your comments and reasoning. Unfortunately, I have everything on my C:\ partition. But, I intend on creating partitions for the system and data on my next computer. Shouldn't be that far in the future. Again, thank you.

John