A tale of epic backup and defrag

What am I doing up at 4am?

I was all done sleeping, I guess.  And what better time to regale you with tales of shit which you care not the least!  Like the subject of these two partial screenshots I took back in January that I thought were remarkable at the time.

Defrag
Defrag2

The top image shows how Defraggler saw one of my external hard drives after I had loaded it up with a consolidated batch of video and audio files.  The deep blue squares are contiguous files, the light blue are contiguous but spaced out, and the red are fragmented.  Fucking NTFS.

The bottom image shows some data about that drive.  With only about a third actually being fragmented, Defraggler still figured it would take about a day to sort that mess out.  Since this was back in January, I don’t remember exactly how long that took, but I do remember it was longer than two days.  And that’s a 1TB drive.

I don’t use NTFS as a file system for my other external hard drives.  I use ext4 because with a modern and well designed files system like that, there is no need to defragment because files don’t get written all stupid in the first place.

All this also reminds me that I bought a bunch of bluray discs so I can make physical backups of some other video files I have.  After losing a bunch of music I had worked on in a hard drive crash, I’ve learned that one can never have too many backups.