Thinkpads Forum

Hi, besides IBM's own R and R, I am starting to use EMC's Retrospect as well (came with Maxtor's 300G HD). But a friend told me that if I defrag. my drive, I would have to do new backup everytime because defrag. involved moving files around. So if I defrag. my drive, it means I can't do progressive or incremental backup?

Does that apply to R and R as well?

One work of caution and advice about software like Retrospect. It is somewhat of static-in-time proposition, in that you usually get a licensed copy of it when you buy a hard drive of some sort. Lots of after market Hard Drives and CD burners have historically included this kind of software. But five years from now you'll be stuck with the same version, (so save -- archive -- the source CD), and it likely will not be updated, upgraded or supported by the licensor (Maxtor).

You're much better off with a more widely used, more widely tested and fully supported backup suite (based on my corporate IT experience). At no cost to you, you already have one version of such a Backup utility included in all versions of windows. Itls called NTBackup. Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup. If it's not there, use Add/Remove programs, it's on your OS CD.

This, FWIW, NTBackup is also a hybrid (best of both worlds?), it's not written by Microsoft, but it's included and supported by them. It's written by Veritas, and it's a base version of a bigger suite of backup software they sell for corporate/enterprise data centers. But, lots of corporations use this, the version straight off the OS CD.

tom2517 wrote:But a friend told me that if I defrag. my drive, I would have to do new backup everytime because defrag. involved moving files around. So if I defrag. my drive, it means I can't do progressive or incremental backup?

Does that apply to R and R as well?

AFAIK the above is NOT TRUE. Defrag should have no effect on what is backed up.