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. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org