Will Disk Defragmentation Pose Risks to Your Data?

As we all know, disk defragmentation can improve our computer performance. But many are confused about whether it will endanger their data, such as causing data loss. This article will discuss this issue in detail.

Disk defragmentation is a procedure to reduce the amount of fragmentation. In brief, disk defragmentation is the rearrangement of data on a hard drive, which can make the drive data stored contiguously and in order. More specifically, what it does is to physically organize the contents of a hard drive used for storing data into the smallest amount of fragments. Moreover, it can create more free storage space via preventing the return of fragmentation. Therefore, users can benefit a lot from it.

However, many users complain that, after disk defragmentation, some of their files disappear for unknown reasons. This case causes extensive panics. Many are worried that disk defragmentation will pose risk to their data. Thus, here we will look at this issue and offers some suggestions.

Won’t Harm Your Data in Normal Situations

Actually, in most normal situations, disk defragmentation will not threaten your data at all. In terms of mechanical hard drives, all of what defragmentation brings to them are benefits only. It is because that disk defragmentation will make your drive data contiguous such that the drive will not need to relocate the disk reader head when loading a file. Thereby, the drive will be able to seek and access data much faster than before. Moreover, disk defragmentation will also slow down the degradation of the hard drive, which can let the drive last for longer.

Disk Defragmentation Can Cause Data Loss If ….

During disk defragmentation, the drive is experiencing great stress in that your computer is working on the drive – relocating data on the hard drive via constant erase and rewrite. Thus, if this process gets interrupted unexpectedly, there are great chances that you will suffer data loss during disk defragmentation. Here are the most common 3 such cases.

1. If your computer gets out of power in this process
2. Provided that your hard drive is already encountering failure or contains some glitches
3. If you are defragging an external hard disk drive but the drive abruptly lose connection with your computer.

Difficult to Recover Deleted File after Disk Defragmentation

It seems inevitable that you may delete any files by mistake on your PC. After the mistaken deletion, you will surely make efforts to attempt data recovery, such as PST recovery. As usual, on Windows-based computers, recovering deleted files is quite easy. But if you have run disk defragmentation after deletion, it will become difficult. It is because that most file recovery software usually uses heuristics and file cluster proximity to do recovery. But after defragmentation, data will become scattered files, which will make recovery more complex and even impossible at worst.

Should Never Defrag On ….

What’s more, disk defragmentation is only applicable for the traditional hard disk drive. Thus, you should never run it on the following kinds of data storage media. Otherwise, you will be very likely to suffer data loss.

1. USB flash drives
2. RAM drives
3. SD cards or Memory cars
4. Network drives
5. Solid state drives

Author Introduction:

Shirley Zhang is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including corrupt sql and outlook repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com