So what are the "rules" for defragging a mac HD -- should you back up everything beforehand & do you lose any of your settings or preferences after the defrag is completed? What utilities do folks suggest for doing a good defrag on these PCI systems?
The performance gain received by defragging varies, depending on the disk volume and the type of work you do. Unlike PCs, defragging is NOT something that you have to do just to keep your system running.
If you do a lot of multimedia work, those volumes should be defragged often.
If you do just general surfing and such, once a year+ is more than ample.
As to technique... There are commercial defraggers, such as the one in Norton Utilities (Speed Disk), that will do the defrag by lifting data then quickly writing it back to the drive. But my personal pref is to use Retrospect Express, and combine defragging with making full backups.
No matter which technique you use, ALWAYS back up ALL your data before make such massive changes to your system!
I make defragging part of a bi-annual "clean up", as follows:
0. Clean up - trash temp files, cache, etc.
1. Make a *complete* double backup of the system. One backup goes to CD-R the other to JAZ disks.
2. Low-level reformat and repartition the drives -- to fully exercise the disk and catch (and lock out) any bad blocks.
3. Put the data back.
+/- a little planning, you can actually do this is a rolling process, running some backups/restores while you're reformatting a drive, etc.
HTH, - Dan.
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