Mac Backup External Drive Got Fragmented? Defrag It Now.

Summary: File fragmentation could be one of the possible reasons behind the slow running of an external hard drive backup`. Ever wondered how your backup drive got fragmented? Don’t worry since this post includes a free method to remove file fragmentation from any hard drive. 

Newer hard drives on Mac don’t get fragmented for many years to come. On the other hand, Solid State Drives (SSDs) never accumulate fragments on its storage space since it doesn’t contain moving parts. Despite all this, fragmentation still remains an exclusive hard drive problem that occurs widely on a Windows system, and occasionally, on OS X Mac. 

How Internal Mac Disk Becomes Fragments?

Internal hard drive fragments because it serves as a primary and frequently used storage device on a Mac. External hard drives being secondary, aren’t used or read-write by the OS X just as the internal hard drives are. Hence, the data gets distributed to multiple locations on the primary Mac drive, that causes the OS X to pick up the file information for the same request from several places to execute. This critical job done by the OS X to fulfil the access request causes delays and more drive’s head movement.

Note: More hard drives head movement repetitions aren’t a good sign for its health.

How External Backup Drives Gets Fragmented?

External storage devices purposely meant to keep an exact backup copy of your Macintosh HD faces file fragments issues due to its source hard drive. If you clone your fragmented Macintosh HD to another drive, then cloning creates a mirror image of your source device to another device. Though the data gets backed up, the destination drive becomes fragmented. This results in unresponsiveness from the external hard drive whenever accessed on Mac.

Fragmentation of Time Machine Drive

The external hard drive used for Time Machine backups are utilized by the OS X twice or more times in a day for backing up the Mac. Nonetheless, the Time Machine external storage device copies the entire Macintosh HD data historically, and it can incremental backup files to the external device too.

Chances of Time Machine disk fragmentation are least if the backup external hard drive is 2X or 3X times the size of the Macintosh HD. Due to the availability of plenty of free spaces on larger drives, the Time Machine drive can perform smoothly whenever approached for files restoration. On the other hand, a small capacity Time Machine hard drive will choke due to rapidly decreasing free spaces, and more importantly, due to incorporation of fragments from the source disks. As a result, the backup restoration may stretch for a longer period than usual.

Defragging a Mac Hard Drive

The source hard drive i.e. internal Macintosh HD requires defragging not just for itself but also for external hard drive. Defragging a Mac hard drive cannot be done using a built-in utility such as Disk Utility or Activity Monitor. Mac hard drive defragmentation can be achieved by using an alternative Mac defrag software.

However, if you aren’t interested in running a specially designed Mac drive defrag utility, then you can perform disk defragmentation using the below steps:

Note: Defragging Mac Hard Drive does not require any special tool 

1.     Image the entire Mac hard drive to external media

2.     Go to Recovery Mode and erase your Macintosh HD

3.     Restore OS X through the Recovery Mode

4.     Restore your files back to your Mac hard drive 

The process of restoring data back to a newly formatted hard drive eliminates file fragmentation or can reduce the severity of fragmentations to a considerable extent. Since the source drive is formatted with a new file system, the backup restoration occupies contiguous memory location rather than distributed. Thus fragmentation is eradicated or reduced.

The Bottom Line

Be it an internal or external Mac hard drive, just remember to keep the storage device free from file fragmentations. Though Macs don’t easily get fragmented yet they aren’t practically safe from fragmentations, especially, the older hard drive that has gone through plenty of head movements.