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I've gotten a new WD 2 Tb external now and am about to set up some backup protocols.
I'm wondering if there would be any advantage to partition my new drive into 2 "drives" of 1 Tb each ... like faster defragging? Do those of you that backup to an external ever bother to defrag the external? If so, how often?
I don't usually defrag my backup drives since I don't often delete my backup files and then replace them so fragmentation is not a serious concern. Even so, a backup drive with semi regular deletions is not nearly as likely to be fragmented as the primary OS drive which is constantly adding, creating and deleting files and is also host to the pagefile, hibernation file and Master File Table each of which is large, dynamic and can add to general fragmentation.
As far as partitioning a backup drive it's not generally necessary and I'd only do it for organizational reasons.
I can't think of much benefit from splitting the drive into two partitions.
I don't defrag my externals very often. You mileage may vary, but you can analyze the drive before you do the defrag.
I've had mine about 2 years and have only defraged once, and then only after a big clean up of some pic's were they were in multiply folders (sometime 10 copy's) and moving some things to disk..
I've never bothered defragging mine either, for much the same reasons as Fink. In any case, NTFS volumes are fairly resistant to fragmentation, and it would be unusual to see an external drive where the fragmentation is so bad that you'd notice a serious performance issue.
I never partition any of my external drives either.
SheilaD--I partitioned my external hard drive, which I use for backups. When I want to do a fresh backup I delete the older existing backup and put the fresh backup on that partition. That way I always (I hope) have a backup (on the other partition) if the fresh backup messes things up.
As you can see I also do not backup every day. Too lazy.
Same here. I don't think I've ever partitioned/defragged a storage drive. No real point in it. Like others have mentioned, it isn't accessed all that often, so it doesn't get fragmented all that much and you can organize it via folders...no real need to partition.
I just love repeating what others have said...just by changing the words around a bit. I guess I'm just "into" being redundant....