defragment and backup?

1 Does Mac OS need to defragment the hard drive?
2 Does Mac OS have its own backup utility? where and how?

Mac Mini 1.83 Core 2, Mac OS X (10.5.6), 2GB memory with Apple Keyboard

Posted on Apr 2, 2009 6:07 AM

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107 replies

Apr 2, 2009 7:10 AM in response to Mauricette

Mauricette:
Does Mac OS need to defragment the hard drive?

Apple says you don't in the article About disk optimization with Mac OS X. However, if your HDD is within 80% of total capacity full, it is a good idea. OS X needs a minimum of 15% of total disk capacity free for swap files and growing the directory. However, that 15% needs to be contiguous space. If it is fragmented, or has large fragments, you can end up with overlapping volume structures. That is, if Extents Overflow needs to expand and does not have sufficient contiguous free space extents that currently have data on them may end up having additional pieces of data written to them resulting in directory corruption. So if you are within the 15% range, defragmentation can save you major headaches.

😉 cornelius

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defragment and backup?

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