[Sca-cooks] Question OT OOP Hopefully Papa won't shoot me

[Terry Decker]

Defragmenting a disk drive takes data scattered over a disk drive and moves
it together (hopefully optomized for retrieval) to improve response times
and to increase contiguous free space of the disk (improves writes).

Because the data is being moved and the directory pointers are being
changed, there is always the possibility for data loss due to software or
hardware failures.  If you have current backups, these occasional errors are
a minor problem.  If you don't have current backups, then you run a small
risk of losing some or all of your data.

Professionally, I take the belt and suspenders approach with daily backups
and automated storage management including defraging.  Privately, I tend
only to backup only the data I want to keep.

Bear

>For you all evil AOL users (Such as myself) I have a question:
>
>Would defraging my computer erase my favorites? Should I save stuff to a
disk
>while defraging? What does defraging do?
>
>Very humble and many prostrations to Papa,
>Misha