I tried to set up Bootcamp and got the dreaded “Files cannot be moved” error. Basically what it was saying was even though I had 50 some odd gigs of extra space, I couldn’t get a 30 GB block of data. In other words my hard drive was fragmented.
If you read about that online you’ll find many Mac users that are adamant that OS X defrags automatically. It does, for small files, but for big ones it doesn’t. Then people argue over whether it makes a difference or not in system performance. That’s a no brainer, yes, your system runs better when it is defragmented (even if it’s just a little bit).
So I needed to defragment.
The next question was, how? After searching online the best option seemed to be iDefrag. It was one of the only options if you look at defragmenting a drive from a Windows perspective, and since the only drives I’ve ever formatted have been Windows drives, that’s how I was looking at it. While reading I came across people supporting this software by saying Apple’s official position of restoring the drive was ridiculous. At first I thought, yeah, that’s ridiculous. After thinking about it more I realized that not only did Apple’s position have merit, but it was by far the best one. This is why.
Restoring from Time Machine is faster and cleaner than iDefrag.
If you don’t have Time Machine set up, today is the day you will finally do what you should have had all along. You will buy an external drive and set it up. First of all not only does it back up your drive in case of a catastrophic error, it also backs up files from YOUR errors (we’ve all deleted files on accident). Second of all, if you have it set up, then this is what happens. Instead of having code run on all your files and try (based on algorithms) to place them in optimal positions and taking forever to do it, all you need to do is a system restore from Time Machine. Why is that better?
Because when Time Machine backs up your files and restores them, it doesn’t put them back in their same fragmented placement. It puts them back better than it could have put them there in the first place when you installed all of your files, because it already KNOWS exactly what you want to put on there ahead of time.
I had 240 GB of information to defrag and it took me 2 hours. All I did was put in my Snow Leopard DVD, and then when I got to the installer menu chose from utilities and restore from backup. That’s it. Afterwards I used the free version of iDefrag to see how well it worked and it was perfect. Beautiful.
PLUS, I magically gained over 10 GB! A lot was hiding in my mess of a disk.
Moral of the story. If you want to defrag your OS X system, just restore from your Time Machine backup every once in a while. It’s Apple’s suggestion and it works perfectly.