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Defragging tib files/folders ?

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Is there any reason to occasionally defrag the MY Backups folder and/or individual tib files ? Perhaps more importantly...are there good reasons not too defrag ??

 Thanks...TRinAZ

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There are no good reasons to defrag and good reasons not to. The only value in defragging, if any, is to speed up file read/write operations. If you do the math, just using average access times you'll see that defragging buys you almost nothing in terms of faster operations -- it's like a pinch of salt an icy highway hundreds of miles long. Even with a really huge file with an ungodly number of fragments, a defragged version will save you only seconds or less on a file that takes many minutes to read. E.g., a 40GB file that is in 2,000 fragments (an uncommonly huge number of fragments) on a disk with an average access time of 9ms, will save you about 18 seconds if you defrag it and read the entire file sequentially, which will take about 30-40 minutes anyway (if you're doing nonsequntail read/writes, then the time savings will be even less).  

On the negative side, your hard disk is a electromechanical device and defragging puts a lot of mechanical wear on the drive while heating it up more than any other disk operation -- heat is the enemy of electronic circuits. Basically, you'd be bringing the drive close to its eventual demise without being able to get an substantial benefit for having done so.

I would add to the risks the following: most/all defrag software use OS APIs to move fragments around. We have seen many cases where just moving a TIB file corrupts it enough to fail a validation, possibly a restore.

Better to spend disk/system resources doing validations than defragmentations, when it relates to archives.