What defragger do you use?

[edX]

ok, since george lien can't seem to ask a question to get the answer he wants or to format his HD for maximum efficiency, i thought i would help him out. after all, the question of "what defragger do you use" is an interesting one.

George seems to think there should be one for ufs. everyone else seems to know that no such beast exists.

so not to beat a dead horse til it runs faster, but what about it folks? which is the best defragger out there in your experience. any addtional comments about 'why' would be appreciated as well.

(God, i hope Norton loses in this)

(spelling corrected )

 

[nkuvu]

I had to vote on the Herve option. I plan to use Alsoft's PlusOptimizer, but that will only happen once I have the money to buy it...

 

[GrBear]

Speed disk works.. from NU7 works fine for me.. You just have to boot uner OS 9 to use it, which is fine because I doubt you'll ever see a defrag util that will work on the system drive, while your booted from it. Also, as I'm sure people have already mentioned before, UFS doesn't need a defrag utility because it's supposed to keep itself defragged.

 

[genghiscohen]

Originally posted by Ed Spruiell

(God, i hope Norton loses in this)

Sorry, Ed, I voted for Norton.
I have actually used both PlusOptimizer and Norton Speed Disk. I go with Speed Disk simply because the custom OS X profiles that are available give me a better result than PO.
That being said, PlusOptimizer is safer! Everyone should be aware that a crash while using Norton Speed Disk will cause severe hard disk damage. A crash while using PlusOptimizer will not.
Guess I just like to live dangerously.

 

[rinse]

I think Apple should bundle a no-frills defragger utility into the OS, perhaps wrap it into Disk Utility.

 

[chenly]

FSCK all of you! Actually, fsck is the BSD command-line disk utility. Login to your machines as the superuser and type

man fsck

at the command prompt to learn all about it. If anyone would like, I have a a nice, shiny PDF of this man page for free distribution. Share and enjoy!

 

[rinse]

Originally posted by chenly
FSCK all of you! Actually, fsck is the BSD command-line disk utility. Login to your machines as the superuser and type

fsck -y

at the command prompt. Share and enjoy!

I was always under the impression that FSCK was just a disk checker, not a degfragger.

Well? Is it?

 

[chenly]

I never typed what's quoted above! Check my post!

fsck is a filesystem consistency check and interactive repair program; see the manual pages.

 

[nkuvu]

fsck == FileSystem ChecK

No defragmentation here.

From the man pages:

fsck - filesystem consistency check and interactive repair

 

[chemistry_geek]

Well, since FRAGGING takes place in Quake3Arena, I would use Anti-Quake3Arena for DEFRAGGING, or click the mouse/press the enter button and magically reappear in a typical Q3A game.

I know, I know, this isn't what you meant, but it was fun rationalizing the idea.

 

[Sogni]

I'm skeered to death to use a defragmenter now!

I've used Norton System Works 1.0 when I had OS9 - I still have OS9 in a small scratch disk I use for Photoshop with System Works 1.0 still installed - but with the bad reports I've been getting about Norton as of late has me scared to death to use it - alto the reports are for 2.0 (or whatever version number is for OSX).

I don't even want to pay for the upgrade to System Works 2.0 if I'm going to be affraid to use it! But I really don't want to buy a different package (Antivirus, System Tools, etc.) - not that I have any spending money at the moment in the first place.

But it makes me nervous not having something to repair my system that I can trust installed... I start worrying if my computer takes extra-long to come up with the Booting OSX screen... or if it goes zombie... or...

*sigh*

But on the bright side - I haven't had any problems since I ditched the bad RAM chip - that was the source of _ALL_ my problems.

But still... I need peace of mind - and System Works 1.0 used to be it... now I'm going crazy! LOL

 

[Sogni]

Originally posted by chemistry_geek
Well, since FRAGGING takes place in Quake3Arena, I would use Anti-Quake3Arena for DEFRAGGING, or click the mouse/press the enter button and magically reappear in a typical Q3A game.

I know, I know, this isn't what you meant, but it was fun rationalizing the idea.

You are making me miss Q3A! I have the CD but it's for Linux and I currently don't have a Linux box (and last I tried it wouldn't work on my copy of Redhat Linux 7.1 for some reason nomater what I tried!)...

Wonder if I can get it to work on OSX somehow...

 

[nkuvu]

I think testuser's advice is the best I've heard all month.

It doesn't matter if you defrag daily/weekly/monthly/never. A good backup is always a good idea. Then Tormente wouldn't have to worry about system crashes.

While we're on the subject of backups, let me relate a little story...

Once upon a time, a few years ago, I was working as a lab assistant in the community college's computer lab. A student was having an awful time trying to restore his final paper. The paper was a 30-page essay. He tried a few times, called me over, and we tried to restore it a whole bunch more. No luck. "It's OK," he said, "I have a backup". So he stuck the backup disk in the drive. Guesses as to what happened? Nothing. Couldn't get the file off the disk. After much fuming and cursing, we determined that the disk drive itself was faulty, and not only that, had destroyed both disks. The moral of the story? For important data, make triple backups.

Or burn onto CDs, so they can't be destroyed easily like magnetic media...

 

[Sogni]

Originally posted by nkuvu
I think testuser's advice is the best I've heard all month.

It doesn't matter if you defrag daily/weekly/monthly/never. A good backup is always a good idea. Then Tormente wouldn't have to worry about system crashes.

I have been making backups, and this works so wonderfully for me (and I have people on here to thank for showing me the ditto command) that I wrote a script (simple bash script in terminal) that I would like to share with the rest of you...

Note: This backus up to a different drive, here called Max40G - change that to whatever drive name you want to back up to... And change "username" to your home directory/user name (launch terminal and it'll be whatever it says just before the "%"

cd /Volumes/Max40G/
echo "removing the backup2 folder"
rm -rf backup2
echo "moving the backup 1 folder to backup2"
mv -f backup1 backup2
echo "moving the backup folder to backup1"
mv -f backup backup1
echo "now backing up your user folder to Max40G/backup"
ditto -rsrc /Users/username/ /Volumes/Max40G/backup

(you can ignore the echo commands - I just put them in so I know what's happening when)

As you can see, I have 3 backups (backup, backup1, backup2).

But to do a single backup, you can just use the last line:

ditto -rsrc /Users/username/ /Volumes/Max40G/backup

If using the last line by itself in terminal, you have to stick "sudo" in front so you don't get permision problems (and enter the admin password - or your password if you're the only user).

I created a directory called scripts in my user directory, and placed the script in there... to activate it, I launch terminal, cd into my scripts directory cd scripts

and I do:
sudo ./backup-script
and enter my password.


And now that the rest of my network is finally starting to come online at my home office (50% of my studio is now home! yay! - I think! lol), I'll be modifing the script to send a copy of my backups to my server once it's online. Yeah - I'm officially paranoid! LOL

I just wish it was this easy to do for my Windows boxes.

 

[Sogni]

Originally posted by testuser
I just thought I would pass along a tip for Tormente. I'm not sure if you realize this or not, but if you create a "bin" directory in your Home it will be part of the execution path. Instead of having to launch a script by explicitly specifying its path:
~/scripts/script3

It can be launched by just typing its name, if it's in ~/bin:
script3

If you have just created or moved a script to bin don't forget to give the "rehash" command to re-read and update the path.

That's cool too...
But it's not really a big deal to me - plus I like having everything I created in my home directory - and whatever the system created wherever it choses.

Also you should make your scripts directory inaccessible to others:
mkdir ~/bin
chmod 700 ~/bin

Not really worried about that since no one else has access to my computers - and the only person that would, does not know of a terminal or even a command prompt to worry about her.

But it's a good think to know tho as I will be working on Linux boxes outside of my own network. So I'll make a note of that just the same. Thanks

OK, let's get back to defragging before Ed gets mad.

Isnt that exactly what we're talking about? hehe

 

[J5]

Hey all -
I've been using os x for about 6 months now, and I'm starting to notice alot more disk activity, leading me to believe that my drive is getting fragged.

I've read the options, and since I don't have any of the tools mentioned, I thought about doing this:

I have 4 partitions on a 40gig drive. 3.5g for os x system, 1g for 9, and 2g for a swap volume. I'm not sure if the swap volume was a good idea, since it's still on the same physical drive as the startup disk.

My plan was to boot into os 9, copy everything off the X startup onto the remaining 20+gig partition (put it all in a folder) then use drive-setup to reformat the x disk, and then copy everything back. I'm just worried that this will corrupt the install somehow and that I won't be able to boot back into X! Not too big of a deal, I imagine I can just reinstall and copy my apps back over, but I just wondered if anyone had any success doing this.

Thanks in advance,
J5

 

[Gambit]

Originally posted by testuser
Ed,
....How many people defragment and check their filesystems every week, yet fail to backup their files every month?

Thanks for giving me a good laugh, testuser. Even if you probably didnt mean to

Gambit

 

[xaqintosh]

and I used Norton Speed Disk with OS 9 until it ruined some of my mp3s, then I stopped defragging. If someone can make a free one I'll use it.

 

[dseltzer]

Thanks a lot, Tormente, for the simple, elegant backup script!
I'm not sure having three backups on the same drive quite clicks for me, but I can see some logic to it.

I know this thread is supposed to be about defragging - sorry, Ed - but would anyone care to share an opinion about Retrospect for OS X?

As for defragging, I've had much better luck with TechTools, and no wierd problems after using it, in contrast to Norton. I've always kept hoping Norton would live up to it's reputation, etc., yet after using it on and off for more years than I'd like to admit, I think it just does things to justify its existence, and tends to do more harm than good, including defragging.

 

[tk4two1]

Norton 7.0.1 was just relased and SpeedDisk now runs native in OS X. But I still keep my vote for not defraging, to me it is a waste of time and too much of a risk. I'm not to keen on loosing what I've got and reinstalling everything. Not to mention pulling everything off my backup that would take all day to do.