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