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I would start by creating and booting from a complete clone. Follow that with a major clean-up. Followed by another complete back-up. Then play with defragging to your hearts content.

Course once you have a tested clone you can clone back and accomplish pretty much the same thing. Note clone volume should be slightly smaller than the internal drive which will force a copy by file clone rather than the faster block copy clone.

I use iDefrag once every couple off months. I really like it. i've had it for a few years now. I especially like how now I don't have to make special boot disks anymore!

None of the other programs or techniques do what iDefrag does - optimize.
It's a brilliant speed bump.

That said - the adaptive technology in the Momentus XT Hybrid also is terrific and generally eliminates the need to defrag. ( basically don't do it - the only way to make it work is clone off, defrag, clone back on and then wait a bit as the adaptive does it's magic.

We like Drive Genius as it is a Swiss army knife - does a lot of things for a reasonable price - especially if you have older machines where drives are getting into their service life. ( 2-3 years for pros ).

BTW Smart Reporter and a drive temperature reporter should be up and running always on any pro rig.

An early warning is a drive higher temp than others in the machine - especially critical in multiple drive arrays.

iDefrag takes it's time, does a n excellent job...and it's cheap for what you get.

A very capable one trick pony. :clap:

+1 on iDefrag.

Doc - can you answer this scenario? You do a full TM backup, format the HD and reinstall the latest OS et al. Then use the OS install disc to return the TM backup to the HD. Question - is the returned information defragged?

Reason for the question is I believed that you needed to defrag the HD prior to TM for a pristine backup and others in the know have said that TM defrags as it copies, while I believe that TM is a sector by sector copy.

Restoring from TM is not a block level copy, it's a file level copy and therefore it won' bring along the pre-existing fragmentation along with it. Some other types of restores, such as doing an ASR restore (via Disk Utility from say an CCC or SuperDuper disk image to a partition -- but only if it's from an actual disk image file not a mounted image) will be block level restores and will not "defrag" (aside from the basic built-in HFS+ defraging of large files on copy). Basically anything that does a file by file copy will not bring pre-existing fragmentation along with it.

Restoring from TM is not a block level copy, it's a file level copy and therefore it won' bring along the pre-existing fragmentation along with it. Some other types of restores, such as doing an ASR restore (via Disk Utility from say an CCC or SuperDuper disk image to a partition -- but only if it's from an actual disk image file not a mounted image) will be block level restores and will not "defrag" (aside from the basic built-in HFS+ defraging of large files on copy). Basically anything that does a file by file copy will not bring pre-existing fragmentation along with it.

Note: Defragging will usually occur when you create the SuperDuper or CCC disk image. Doing a block copy on restore is more or less just a time saver.