defrag audio partition with audiofiles still on it

[Eiko]

Here's the question: is it safe if I defrag this partition of mine with all my audio files, sample collection etc on it? I remember longtime ago, I did a defrag of one of my drives where I had some sessions stored. After defrag these sessions would not play back properly anymore, instead they would stutter and drop out. Was this just bad luck, and is it normally no problem, or is defragmenting audiofiles generally not a good idea? I mean, they're just files, like a word doc, which opens fine after defrag, so why should it be a problem with Audio?
Maybe there's a reference to the location of each chunk of audio embedded in the session file (in the described case this was a cubase song) which of course would be incorrect after defragmentation, as the chunks got moved...
Does anybody know?

Oh, BTW, happy Easter, and don't eat to many Easter eggs

Cheers, Eiko

[mindnoise]

hi there are extensive threads on this topic here, search for "defrag" or similar notions.

essentially: don´t do it!
backp to another drive/partition erase the original an copy back.
faster, safer and more efficiant.

regs

[Mellontron]

Mindnoise nailed it... I was working on a track for the band America , and almost lost most the tune defraging and not consolidating..... I since have cleaned up my sloppy file management --there is a great article with my friend Gina Fant-Saez who is a PT pioneer ....it's on this site --I think under developers,,,,, She gives great pro tips on file management that helped me out a ton.Cheers..mellontron

[where02190]

Nothings backed up until it's backed up twice. If these are your only copies of these files the first thing you do is back them up, then back them up again, and then it is safe to defrag the drive. However since now you hav eth drive backed up twice(having also confirmed the backups indee d work) simply reiinitialize the drive(which takes a few seconds) and backup once again to the newly reinitialized, completely defrag'd drive.

[DJ Insomaniac]

i recall reading that ProTools doesn't support RAID configurations. if so, this should be a major goal for future releases. RAID could save so much time.