External drive ALWAYS needs to be defragmented

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External drive ALWAYS needs to be defragmented

by Stephen
(Los Angeles, CA)

I have a 1TB Maxtor USB external hard drive connected to a Dell Inspiron 9100 Laptop which is used a system backup repository. I am currently using Acronis 2009 as my backup software. For some reason, this external drive ALWAYS needs to be defragmented. I run full system backups 3-4 time/wk and every time I run a backup, the drive is almost totally fragmented requiring countless hours to defrag. Any information or guidance as to why this occurs and how to correct the problem would be greatly appreciated.

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External drive ALWAYS needs to be defragmented

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Jun 06, 2009
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Fragmented External Hard Drive
by: Support

Hello Stephen,

It would be unusal for a backup to become fragmented. A backup is done sequentually, one file after another.

There are some possiblities as to why it is happening -

The backup type.
If you are doing a differential then the only files that get backed up are the ones that the date has changed on. (even a full backup)

Open files when the backup is running, are you scheduling the backup to run the same time a AV scan is running?

Temp file directroy, do you have the temporary file location in the backup?

The external drive is to large, that is are you using the full drive as storage, not split up in to smaller partitions?

Then it could be the backup software, you didn't say what Operating System you have installed. If if it is Windows then there is a backup built in to the OS, you could try that one time to see if it is your 3rd party backup software.

These are some of the things I have seen that cause problems with a back up.

Hope this helps...

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