Avoiding spurious defrag when partitions restored.

[Alan_B]

I believe some audio/video processing applications work best if their files/streams are not defragmented.

 

My past experience is that when an Acronis Partition Image backup is restored,

then all the files are fully defragmented and all free space is consolidated,

with the result that "Reserved Free Space" is contiguous with the block of files,

and not close to half way in the free space region as recommended by Microsoft and implemented by Defraggler.

 

Ghost Image and probably most similar products do the same when under varying names they make Intelligent (non-Forensic) copies.

 

Macrium v4.2 and v5.0 do not do this.

Fragmentation/distribution in the partition before the image is made will reappear when the image is restored.

 

This may be useful to those who are audio/video enthusiasts.

 

For me the special feature is that when a Patch Tuesday goes wrong and I restore the system to the previous day,

all the files will be in exactly the same sectors as previously, so I may continue to use Incremental backups.

When I was using Acronis any image restore altered sector allocation so horrendously that Incrementals were a waste of space,

and it was better to start again with another full image.

 

A simple test on C:\ which had not been defragged for a few months.

A full initial backup was 5.71 GB (6,132,976,750 bytes)

Then I did a defrag.

An incremental backup was 2.29 GB (2,460,759,584 bytes) because all the same files were in different sectors.

Then I restored C:\ from the full initial backup and all the fragmentation was restored as proven by the next

Differential backup of 33.5 MB (35,213,312 bytes),

which proves that 2,425,????,??? bytes of the defragged files were put back exactly as they had been,

and the residual 35,213,312 bytes that moved/changed were part of the usual 80,???,??? bytes that Windows relocates each day as it "tunes-up"/optimises/fiddles-with-itself.