What is the best practice for preparing a system partition for backup?

[Alan_B]

My HDD's were wiped when Windows was installed three years ago on my Desktop computer.

My SSD was new 10 months ago when it was added to my system and erased and then had Windows installed.

I have never defragged because I see zero potential benefit.

Defraggler v11 (with valid pagefile colours) is showing :-

My 60 GB SSD partition C: has

91 fragmented files (431.2 MB)

634 Total Fragments

2% Fragmentation (last week it only measured 1%)

My MBR style Samsung HDD Data and Non-Portable Apps Partition D: has

213 fragmented files (141.0 MB)

1,307 Total Fragments

18% Fragmentation

My MBR style Samsung HDD Portable Apps Partition H: has

42 fragmented files (11.2 MB)

120 Total Fragments

2% Fragmentation

My GPT style WDC HDD Image Archive Partition E: has

3,773 fragmented files (246.3 GB)

19,326 Total Fragments

60% Fragmentation

I see no reason to Defrag C: or H:

and a powerful reason to NOT defrag them;

Every sector that receives relocated data is another sector that must be captured in the next Macrium Image Incremental backup.

My 60 GB SSD has 11.4 GB of Used Space

A Full image backup is 6.5 GB,

and a weekly Differential Image is about 100 MB - BUT past experience is that a defrag would increase that to over 2 GB

D: does not need defragging - I just have to run CCleaner and it will purge all the browser caches which have almost all the fragments.

E: does not need defragging - I rarely need to access an image backup file and when I do access a 7 GB Full + Incremental I doubt that 100 fragments will slow my access.

[KCav]

"not responding" ........ There was a time, it seems like only yesterday when "not responding" would appear on my screen. It came, and it went, I couldn't perminetly get rid of it. That was when I became a keep a clean system addict.

Last night I left SUPERAntiSpyware, Malwarebytes, and Microsoft Security Essentials all running simultaneously. This morning I looked at my screen and found run time was about 2 hours. There were no problems detected except for 22 Tracking Cookies detected by SUPERAntispyware. I clicked Remove and then I ran CCleaner. It ran quickly and found a few temporary files and removed them. Then I checked CCleaners Startup feature. i did not find any programs other than those I had setup. Next I started Defraggler. I thought about having a cup of Heavenly Brewed Sunshine but decided to go back to sleep. When I got up Defraggler had completed defragging and my disk was in Good condition. I clicked on Display files to see which files were not contigouous. There were two big system files and lots of small ones. On the drive map I placed my cursor over sectors that had fragmented files in them. Then I checked the defrag field and all the files were checked, and I clicked degrag. Sometimes the degragment routine aborted. When this happened I unchecked the System files and ran degrag again, until i completed. Then I ran degrag on the whole disk for a second time. I have zero framentation.

I'm off to have breakfast now, when Iget back would like to disuss What does over clean mean.

KC

[Alan_B]

Over clean is when the baby got thrown out with the bath water

i.e. you broke something.

[system]

You might have zero defragmentation, but are your files optimally placed on the disk for minimum seek times? There's programs that not only defrag, but re-order the files so they fly under the head in sequence as the cpu asks for them. Minimal thrashing. With something like this, if you use a mechanical spinner disk, you can knock 2-4 seconds off your boot time. An SSD? No effect.

I absolutely love sorting out the data on my disk. Alphabetizing it, sorting it by filetype, and size and purpose. All the infrequently used files like [jpg mp3 chm rar zip bmp doc pdf] and so on are lifted up and off the disk, out of the OS'es way and shoved into the center. Thus leaving lots of contiguous space for organizing the OS files just so. No need to have those sporadically-accessed files "stuffing up" the OS. Ultimate Defrag does this. There might be others. It's great fun to play with when there's nothing else to do. Make tea and crumpets and watch the disk "magically" sort itself out. It has a simulation mode so you can watch it do its thing or just have fun with it. It reads your disk info and then makes a fake run without making any changes to the real disk. So you can see the results. But to do it every day or every week is just plain old nuts. The little bit of fragmentation that *does* occur during normal use is buried in the buffers and other latencies inherent in a modern PC.

One activity that helps give you a snappier Start menu you can actually see and feel is grouping all the shortcut links, directories, and NTFS Metafiles into one area on the disk. Everything. Including $MFT $LogFile $Bitmap $AttrDef $UpCase $MFTMirr $Secure $ObjId. Put hiberfil.sys at the back too. Pagefile.sys should also be close to the OS files. Then I also make sure all the boot files are at the front of the disk, and then next up is the Windows directory and files.

Theoretically.

That is one small example of OVEROPTIMIZING, and one I like to tell from time to time. It's alright to do something like that every 6 months or so. But there are people doing this sort of tediousness on a daily basis. Crazy, man, I tell you!

I also do not recommend using multiple anti-virus and anti-mal-ware things all at one time. Be careful, if one AV doesn't like something, and another 2nd AV sees it has been put in Quarantine or observes mal-ware being handled by something (1st AV) it might get pissed off and attack the 1st AV program. Then the 1st one, being attacked gets upset and deactivates the 2nd one doing the initial attack. It's like WTF buddy!?!? And in the processes something breaks or freezes. Soon this business starts a-going back and forth at a high rate of speed, consuming greater and greater resources. Each program fighting against each other. Disk thrashing loudly. If this goes on too long your computer will explode. That is what's called OVERSCANNING.

OVERCLEANING is similar, it means to be compulsively deleting stuff from the registry and clearing caches and temp files so often that you spend more time doing that then doing something productive. The before and after results show little to no improvement or space gains. And oftentimes, you delete temp files and log files the system uses on a daily basis - thus forcing the system to spend more time recreating them. Like an internet cache.

[KCav]

My heart is strangely warmed when I read No Errors Detected and see my hard drive has Zero defragmentation. I think my emotionality would be less strong if I knew how to proactively detect errors and create log files that identified the sequence and files causing the problem, but all I know is how to run cleaners that sometimes clean excessively.

I love running Defraggler. I love CCleaner too.

I want to learn what content to put into CCleaners Advanced options under (1) Custom files to delete and folders to empty feature, and (2) Select cookies you want to keep function. I have checked Save all files to ini file. I think I’m on track and soon will reassess what it means to over clean, and become a pragmatic liberal.

[system]

The files you put into CCleaner's list can be just about anything you want to delete..

1- I have added such things as logs and empty directories created by applications.

2- A data recovery application I sometimes use; it makes copies of what I'm recovering straight to the main C drive. Pretty stupid. So I added that in.

3- Status reports from other utilities.

4- Some programs make their own cache, especially some cd burning tools and disk testing tools. These caches and logs are important only for the moment and serve no long-term purpose.

5- A couple of unruly programs insist on making duplicate settings files in the Documents & Settings folder, despite me specifying otherwise. The dev's say it's for "backup" purposes. Meh..

6- Some Firefox and IE things that CCleaner doesn't go over.

7- I do a lot of photo and scientific work, and use programs that leave temp files behind, so those are added in.

One time, at the end of 2 months, I ran my custom list and zapped 17GB!

[KCav]

I would like to express my appreciation for the good advice given about how to prepare a disk for backup. Here is my revised plan. I would appreciate your comments.

1. Custom configure CCleaner:

a) specify cookies to keep

b ) specify files to remove

c) select folders and registry entries that CCleaner should exclude from removing

Run CCleaner manually every night before shutting down the system

2. Custom configure Defraggler:

a) move large files to end of drive during whole drive defrag

b ) don’t move large files during Defrag Freespace

Run Defraggler when adding/deleting programs

3. Schedule a Microsoft Security Essentials Full scan to run every M,W,F night

4. Once a month run SUPERAntiSpyware, Malwarebytes, Acronis System Cleaner, AVG Registry Optimizer; do not run simultaneouly, do not clean.

a) print list of files reported as dangerous

b ) Google file name to see if others have problems with a file

c) adjust CCleaner custom settings

Again, thank you for your help, and please send me comments on my revised plan. CCleaner is very efficient. I plan to make extensive use of it. Still chewing on how to position small files for optimal disk performance.

KC.

[system]

That could work. As long as it's something you can live with.