[QUOTE=zebadee;2066719]Hi 
Most defragging s/w now has the ability to ārun in backgroundā.
Hoever āFullā & āOfflineā defraging are still required to maintain a fully defragged drive.
The applies in particular to Vista, which locks files. Preventing ābackgroundā defragging in any shape.
Full defragging will defrag most of this area.
However there will remain a āhardcoreā lock of some key files even then.
Hence the need ( again more so with Vista) for āOfflineā defragging.
Another thing to note is that some programs defrag in a different priority to standard defrag.
Meaning that a proper complete defrag is never acheived.[/QUOTE]
You are right, but IME Diskeeper 2k8 works a bit differently since itās optimized for ābackgroundā defrag with low resource consumption, rather than being a manual defragger with an optional ābackgroundā mode. Itās meant to be installed and turned onā¦and thatās itā¦almost nothing else to do. It was designed for corporate applications (servers etc) and the tech made itās way to the desktop editions I think.
The locked files that needed an āoffline defragā are usually the MFT and page file, but DK defrags most of the MFT āonlineā itself. Only the last stage needs to be defragged āofflineā and itās usually very short. It also actively minimizes the fragmentation of the MFT by enlarging it āin advanceā when required. I think same goes for PF, but not 100% sure.
Defragging vista if VSS is enabled on partitions with smaller than 16k cluster size is quite tricky. Excessive file movement apparently fools the VSS and triggers the creation of new shadow copies/SRPs thereby deleting older ones. Or so, iāve read.
So, itās good to defrag Vista and WHS with defraggers that have a VSS friendly defrag mode. In fact, I use only the VSS defrag mode of DK on Vista, and so far itās been fine.
