NTFS DEFRAG on Ubuntu!

[churst1]

I have a external hard-drive, NTFS-formatted.
I need to defrag it But i dont want to loose the data on it.
I run ubuntu 'feisty' on a old pc2800 computer.
Can you defrag NTFS on Linux????? Please help!

[caf4926]

fragmentation is really a windblows problem
i'm not aware of anything

[nordle]

churst1:

Why is it NTFS? If its so you can use it with other computers and can't install ext2/3 driver on them, then can you not use that machine to defrag it?

If there is no reason to have NTFS, ditch it, copy the data to another disk, and re-format using ext3.
Leave a 15MB partiton as VFAT to hold the windows ext2/ext3 driver on it, so you can install on any machine to view your data.

http://www.ext2fsd.com/

Or maybe better:

http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

[ollie]

churst1:

Why is it NTFS? If its so you can use it with other computers and can't install ext2/3 driver on them, then can you not use that machine to defrag it?

If there is no reason to have NTFS, ditch it, copy the data to another disk, and re-format using ext3.

If the external drive is being used to work on data from both Linux and Windows you are better off formatting as FAT32. Windows can only format partitions up to 32 GB as FAT32, but can read and write to FAT32 partitions much larger. As nordle said, copy the data to somewhere else then use Linux (or it is even easier in Mac OS X) to create and format the partition as FAT32. You now have an external hard drive that can be read & written too by Windows, Linux & Mac OS X.

[MartyBartfast]

Just out of curiosity does anyone know, if you were to copy the data off somewhere else (tar/dd/cp or whatever), then delete it from the NTFS drive and just copy the data back, would the files be copied back contiguously?

[Dutch_Master]

The housekeeping chores by the Linux kernel is so much superior to whatever M$ came up with that there aren't even defrag-progs for Linux!

[Rhakios]

Just out of curiosity does anyone know, if you were to copy the data off somewhere else (tar/dd/cp or whatever), then delete it from the NTFS drive and just copy the data back, would the files be copied back contiguously?

Well dd probably wouldn't work as it makes a bit-for-bit copy, but I find copying the data off, formatting the device, then copying it back, works well enough for fat formatted devices.

[nelz]

If the external drive is being used to work on data from both Linux and Windows you are better off formatting as FAT32.

Unless you are working with large files (>4GB) which FAT32 cannot handle.

[ollie]

Unless you are working with large files (>4GB) which FAT32 cannot handle.

Sorry for not providing full limits, but then there is no cross platform format 100% guaranteed to work. Hopefully this has changed with ntfsprogs and Fuse for Mac OS X.

[nelz]

There's also NTFS-3G, a FUSE filesystem for NTFS and Paragon's NTFS for Linux, a commercial product. both work well for NTFS reading and writing.

[Myztry]

Back in the old days when I was a Windows User (Ubuntu now), I used to use Ghost when I wanted a serious defrag. It may sound silly but persevere.
Make a back up image using ghost, then restore it back over the source. Ghost does a restore file by file. It also happens to do it in file, directory and sector sorted order.
The pleasant by product is your once grinding box would come up quickly after about a few intermittent Drive Led flashes.
This could be done outside your OS via a boot disc. The only reason I stopped doing this is because Ghost became cumbersome and required multiple boot discs. Still the original simple floppy versions could handle NTFS fine.
Also you end up with a backup file, though you need a spare partition to place it.

[nordle]

I recently install WinXP on a machine, installed all the apps, all the files etc

The system was pretty quick.

I defragged the hd as a last thing to do before leaving and re-booted. The system was horrible, reallly really slow, I could here the drive crunching away like crazy.

I booted again, and again. The result was the same, and after a few more defrags over the last month, its still slow as anything.

Further supporting Myztry's point.