how to do a disk defragment on a mac book

To cartographerNick: i'm educated enough as a Mac user to tell other Macuser that they don't have to buy / use defragmentation software.

For those few who would need to defragment their HD: Make a Time Machine back-up, or clone your disk (with superduper!), format the drive and install a fresh os X, copy TM back-up back or copy back the clone.

Free, fast en save.

That's it.

No specialised defragmentation software needed.

CartographerNick wrote:

It's absolutely helpful to defragment a mac disk,

OSX performs defragmentation for itself, it requires no help from ill conceived utilities. iDefrag itself is junk. Take some time and read the many many posters here who bought it and now regret wasting their money.

Do you work for Coriolis?

DO yourself a favor and organize your files by size and see how many files of yours aren't getting defragmented (non ssd) if you don't have many you shouldn't be posting in this support forum.

There seems to be two sides to this defragmenting issue here. Both are correct in their own ways but only slightly. Here is the truth.

Mac does do routine file defragmentation as you go about your normal activies. But it only defrags files of 20mb-50mb (apple tells you if you look but this is around the sizes) or less routinely. This means that if you do a bunch of read/write operations of larger files (large pictures, audio editing, video editing, downloading movies, downloading archives, etc) that you WILL have to eventually defragment your harddrive.

There are people that says it does nothing to help and can only do harm if you do defragment. However this isn't the case. Macbooks are computers just as much as PC's are computers. Both do benifit from routine maintenece as well.

If you move large files (moving large files to a backup HDD and deleting as well) your system will end up fragmented.

I do my defraging with ONYX and iDefrag.

First I backup what I need/want. Then I repair permissions using ONYX. Then I do a full defrag with iDefrag.

I can tell you for sure that this has helped my system. I do alot of audio editing (audio engineer/producer) with huge .wav files all of the time. My bootup speed increased to boot in 40 seconds (compaired to before at 1:20) and everything runs much smoother again (just like new).

But also be sure that you DO NOT defrag an SSD (will burn it out faster) and ALWAYS make a backup!

Hope this helps!

You state: Mac OSX has tools to copy to a clean external drive, boot off that drive, wipe your hard drive, and copy back.

My question is 2 fold..

1. when you say clean external drive you are suggesting a completely empty external drive?

2. I have an Imac with OSX, but it has slowed way down in recent months, it has 4GB of memory, 1.48GB of usalbe space but still very very slow, and crashing once a quarter as of late...I want to safely save all my data on my Mac, could I put it on my Macbook Air as the "external drive?" If so is there a detailed video or article on how to do this? **would backing up to Carbonite be a wise thing?**

No,

Carbonite has well documented issues with iPhoto and iTunes databases, frankly it's junk.

Get an external drive and back up to that.

I must concur with Csound about Carbonite being totally worthless when comes to backing up anything on an Apple that uses a database to store its data. I tested it with a test copy my data and discovered that it was not able to restore a fully functional copy of anything that was using a database.

Allan