Hi, Here is a tricky one. We are currently using five 300GB removable Hard drive (SATA harddrives in removable hard drive rack) as a solution to perform our backup via NT backup. Each disk backups up a week's worth of daily schedule NT backup and rotated at the beginning of the week When a new disk is inserted to perform the week's backup, it is formatted first even before the first backup takes place. After the first backup takes place, I analysis the disk using disk defragmenter and it would always indicate ' you should defragment this volume’ this is so even if I defrag and analysis the disk again tomorrow. Any suggestion why this is so? I am thinking about including a batch file to run daily disk defrag after the daily backup completes but I wonder if this would put more strain on the disk -- won't they wear out faster if i defrag everynight? Welcome any suggestion.

Why do you defrag a backup disk? In my opinion, it's a waste of time and energy and you should stop it. And yes, I'm aware of what opinions are like.... I know why I defrag the hard drive in my PC that has my operating system on it. Simply put, if the files are contiguous (ie: not fragmented) the applications load quicker as the drive spends less time searching for the data. I see no value to defragging a backup hard drive as you're not running anything on it "real time". It's just there storing data in case your server dies or it's' hard drive(s) die so you can restore the data. Granted a nicely defragged hard drive might restore quicker than a fragmented one, but we're talking an infitessimal small amount of time in the scheme of things so again I say, there seems to me to be no value in wasting time defragging you backup hard drives. If your reasoning is you can fit more data on them when they're nicely defragged think about this: You put a whole weeks data on a single disk. Pretend you come in on Friday and find out the HDD in the drive has gone bad and you can no longer get any data off of it. Two minutes later, the hard drive in the server containing the data you're backing up dies. How many days data do you lose when you go to restore? Answer: a weeks worth. Now let's say I setup your backup. In which case I would create an unmanaged backup set in ntbackup. A different hard drive would be put in the bay every morning. ie: a single day's backup on each disk. Same scenario as above. How much data do you lose when you go to restore? Answer: one day's worth of data Which makes more sense to you? Peronally, I think losing a day's worth of data is a lot "better" than losing a whole week's worth. My suggestions are as follows: 1) Stop defragging your hard drives. 2) Create a backup set (unmanaged so you don't have to bother with labelling the media...this is real handy in the case of long weekends when you're not there to change the backup media....the backup doesn't get missed because ntbackup isn't looking for a disk with a particular label) which rotates the disks on a daily basis. 3) Buy an extra disk or two and alternate your Friday backups. ie: 3 Friday disks. Week one you use Friday 1. Week 2 you use Friday 2 and so on. Take the 2 Friday disks that aren't due to be backed up to that week offsite in case of fire or other disasters in the work place.

Thanks for the advice CurtR!