On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 6:46 AM, Alan McKinnon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Friday 28 November 2008 13:14:42 Dale wrote: >> If this is a little high, what would be the best way to defrag it? > > By not defragging it. > > It's not Windows. Windows boxes needs defragging not because fragmentation is > a huge problem in itself, but because windows filesystems are a steaming mess > of [EMAIL PROTECTED] that do little right and most things wrong. Defrag > treats the > symptom, not the cause :-) > > Reiser tends to self-balance itself out. What is especially noteworthy is that > none of the general purpose Linux filesystems provide a defrag utility. > Theodore 'Tso and Hans Reiser are both exceptional programmers, if there was > a need for such a tool they would assuredly have written one. They did not, > so there probably isn't. > > Any Linux defrag tool you encounter will have been written by a third party > separate from the developers. It will move blocks around and update > superblocks, the drive will have to be unmounted for that to work and a > slight misunderstanding of how to do it will ruin data. > > Are you willing to take the very real risk of data corruption? > >> Is >> there a best way? I do have a second hard drive that I back up too. >> Both Drives are 80Gbs and I do have a set of DVD back ups as well. I >> can update those pretty quick. > > > > -- > alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com > >
While not trying to incite flames here... xfs isn't general purpose? xfs_fsr defrags xfs partitions while they're mounted and is designed to be used from cron (it's in xfsdump, not xfsprogs). File fragmentation, while a fact of life on any filesystem that sees any real use, does slow access times, as the drive head has to jump from one place to another, so a lot of fragmentation is a bad thing... but as you say, we're not dealing with FAT based FS's here, so severe fragmentation only shows itself on very full filesystems. I very rarely see over 80% usage of my filesystems and have never consistently checked fragmentation levels, though, so I can't say whether xfs's being the exception on having a tool for the job means it particularly needed one... -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
