Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3574 mails)

[Aaron Kulkis <akulkis00@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Joe Sloan wrote:
> Jerry Houston wrote:
> > For years, defragging hard drives has been part of my routine system
> > maintenance on Windows systems.  It occurred to me that I've now had
> > Linux systems up and running long enough that it might be a good idea to
> > defragment their drives, to make sure everything is running as smoothly
> > as possible.
> >
> > I haven't been able to find any information about drive defragmentation
> > for Linux file systems.  Searching for "defrag" with the software
> > installer turned up no results.  Is it called something else in Linux land?
> >
> > Is defragmentation possible for Linux file systems?  Is it needed
> > occasionally, as it is on Windows systems?
>
> A lot of windoze converts ask "where is the anti-virus software", and
> just as it's not really an issue, and in the same vein, defrag just
> isn't something linux users ever have to worry about either.
>
> The reason is intelligent storage policies - just think of unix file
> systems as an office where a competent secretary keeps things filed
> properly while working.
>
> OTOH pc file systems are more like the office where files are tossed
> randomly after use, and every weekend, people are hired to come in and
> organize the files.
>
> Having said that, there is a possibility of some fragmentation in unix
> file systems, and there have even been some tools to reorganize things,
> just as there have been anti-virus companies offering linux antivirus
> programs (!?) but in general neither are ever needed in practice.

If you REALLY want to do that...
boot into maintenance mode (runlevel S)
and then tar off a filesystem onto tape...or a spare partition,
re-create (an empty) filesystem, and then restore the tar file
back to the partition.

This was standard practice in the 4.2/4.3 BSD days.
Not so much because files were fragmented, but because
the free-space was fragmented, which could then lead to
new files becoming fragmented.

That being said, it's completely unnecessary on Linux.



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