Obtaining status of scheduled or background Defraggler tasks

Defraggler
1

This is a feature request (Unless of course there is already a way of achieving it that searching the help hasn't found).

After using CCleaner for several years I tentatively tried Defraggler on secondary machine (just in case) before moving to my main machine which still on XP and newly re-installed desperately needed de-fragmenting (the inbuilt defrag is so poor).

However my 200 GB drive is split into 5 partitions and Defraggler has no way yet to run the GUI on multiple partitions. The suggestion in the post "leave Defraggler de-fragmenting 4 partitions when I am sleeping" is exactly what's needed.

However I worked out that the scheduled option would probably have some method of coping with multiple partitions and so set up multiple scheduled tasks to carry out the process. I set these up as run full de-fragmentation once and delete (I set them up and then edited the scheduler).

Then came my next problem. 12 hours later all four schedules were shown as still running and I could not run the GUI as the GF.EXE task was still running. So I could not get a status of the four defrag tasks and get an idea of how much longer. As I type the last task is still running 32 hours later. The drives have a huge number of files and folders and so the long times are not unexpected. When using some earlier programs I have tuned them to only de-fragment files and improve free space (not fully de-fragment it) as it is the attempt to optimise that uses all the time which defeats the object of de-fragmenting in the first place - saving time.

So my request, if it isn't obvious already, is to be able to connect to the background scheduled task and display the status in the GUI. While not trivial this is not an impossible task, firewall and anti-virus programs do this as a matter of course - they run from SYSTEM but have a GUI in user space. Just how much information and interaction I leave as an exercise for the programmers, but would as a minimum request :-

  • Percentage of task completed / Status
  • Any time estimates and elapsed time
  • access to the fragmentation analysis

[Footnote: 32 hours 15 minutes and it finished, finally I can look see]

2

Did you think what could be happening to the disk heads, if you had been allowed to defragment multiple partitions on the same hard disk?

3

Did you think what could be happening to the disk heads, if you had been allowed to defragment multiple partitions on the same hard disk?

The direct answer is that on a good hard disk with large buffer and seek optimisation, the 4 tasks in parallel should complete in less time than the 4 tasks in series. It is no different than any multitasking use of the drive. However see below for what I actually meant to say. P.S. I have run multiple parallel defrags on a single hard disk, though I cannot remember which product allowed it, it was a trial and for other reasons I didn't buy it.

As the feature is still not in 1.18.185 I will add.

OOPS! Sorry I thought it was obvious that what I meant is what is in most of the commercial packages allow, to QUEUE the 4 requests so that when one finishes the next starts. Since my post I have played with the scheduler and set 4 schedules starting at 30 minute intervals, this seems to achieve the desired queue. However the one problem is that I cannot check what is happening until the logs appear. If this could be set in the GUI then turning the monitor on occasionally would allow me to check on progress.

Additionally some of my partitions are on separate disks, why shouldn't I run all of these in parallel?

Being able to run the GUI to check on the status of the scheduler would also help.

Sorry I forgot to turn on e-mail notification and so missed this reply.