Definitely back up before de-frag, no matter what's on the drive.

Jay Tee 4303
Definitely back up before de-frag, no matter what's on the drive.

You got that right!

razor

Jay Tee 4303
Definitely back up before de-frag, no matter what's on the drive.

You got that right!

Where's this coming from?

The only problems with defragging that I have ever heard about were always associated with third-party defragging software.

Depending on the level of fragmentation, you are going to move everything on your hard drive to a different place, including parts of the OS, and in the process, data from target locations can be "erased" and held in buffer, while new material fills its spot, before being itself written to a new area.
 
You are accessing many, if not all areas of the drive, and the heads are in constant motion throughout. From the position that a parked head has zero chance of a head crash, defrag ops represent the opposite end of the probability spectrum.
 
Defrag routines are mature, and largely robust, I don't recall any recent problems with mine, but I have lost entire drives, and many files, over the course of decades, and anytime I move quantities of data, including major copy operations, I back up first.
 
Its your data. Nobody cares about it as much as you (except the NSA, and they already have multiple copies that you aren't allowed to access). It's akin to emptying your house into your backyard, so you can reorganize it piece by piece throughout. If you are comfortable parking your wife's diamonds and your collection of gold coins out by the swingset with the rest of the Tupperware bins, till you have the room they are destined for cleaned and organized, have at it. I prefer to avoid risk, build up good karma, and save edgy maneuver till I really need it.

That's a dramatic description of something that ought to be just a routine operation.
 

Kev999
That's a dramatic description of something that ought to be just a routine operation.
 

When I cut my teeth in IT, system problems grounded a $5 billion dollar fleet of commercial aircraft, (new, financed, 73s, 75s and a handful of L-10s) and flight ops called their VP, who called my VP, and we had all night, just the two of us, to decide who screwed up, (me), who was gonna fix it yesterday, (me), and who was going to pay for the lost ass-miles, (superficially, me).
 
It had it's dramatic moments, but not as dramatic as I see here, when months or years worth of work disappears.
 
YMMV.
 
:-)

Kev999
That's a dramatic description of something that ought to be just a routine operation.

Yes it is perhaps overly dramatic. In actual fact your computer is not dumping everything in the backyard, it is moving a few things at a time to clear out space and replacing them in the cleared space. Most of your files remain intact and in place during these moves, and the only ones at risk of loss during a crash are the ones that are actually being written. But if it happens to be a critical system file that gets corrupted, you may effectively lose the use of your computer. 

back up should be in place regardless, however I have NEVER seen a defrag cause dataloss

jcschild
back up should be in place regardless, however I have NEVER seen a defrag cause dataloss

I have. To be fair, the drive was already thrashing, which prompted the defrag. It got to clickin and whirrin and never quit, that was it. Hung the defrag mid process and I never accessed anything on that drive again. Fortunately it was backed up.

The only time I had a harddrive fail is on the C:\ primary partition. I keep nothing on it (except the little programs may put there). All my files of different programs are on different partitions. I never had other partitions fail - only the C:\ Primary partition. If wanting to copy files that can be done though by having another harddrive and copying the files.
In fact they should not be fragmented with the copying of the files, because each file is transfer as a unit to the other harddrive (partition). But then I do not keep soft synths and many things like that for music. Just the Project files and all of that with Cakewalk Projects and the program on the partition. And if having a second harddrive it is easy to copy the partition to another partition on the second harddrive and have a backup (they won't be fragmented or at least i am thinking that way).
Well, back to not all so many projects in Sonar. Maybe someday. And on my old XP computer I have ran that way for now at least 7 years (six probably actually) with no problems at any time. Either the harddrive goes after a couple of years or it may last for 10 years, but then I suppose I do not use the harddrives that much with the partitions except the C:\ drive Primary Partition. That fails, the rest of the harddrive can still be read and tranferred to a different harddrive, after getting a new harddrive to put the OS on and restart the computer and take out the what was the second harddrive (if only two) and putting in the wrecked harddrive and transferring the files on the rest of the partitions that had everything else there. Of course there is in-stalling software again, but with the Sonar Projects, it is just transferring (copying) the files to the new harddrive on the same letter drive partition.
?? To each their own.