Precautions before defragmenting Mac

If you are noticing slow performance of your Mac, you need to take action for the health of your Mac and perform a defragmentation process.  A defragmentation is the process of organizing fragmented files on your hard drive in continuous memory locations. With the passage of time, files get fragmented and scatter in your Mac hard drive and it takes extra effort by your Mac processor to search and access. When files remain in an organised way, it becomes easy for processor to access it fastly.

These are some precautions which should be taken by every Mac user before defragmentation:-

1. Keep backup – Back up your data to an external hard drive. Back up all of your files with the Time Machine application to keep full backup of your Mac before going to defragmentation. It is very necessary so that data can be protected if there is any chance of losing data.

2. Defragmentation process takes up to 5-6 hours to deceive the Macintosh PC. It is an good idea to use this process at night.

3. When Defrag is completed, you will find that you are working faster. Performance has been improved.

4. You should maintain at least 10-15% of your hard drive capacity as free space. This gives your Mac capability to run smoothly.

Will defragging delete any (downloaded/ bought) applications or any of my files?

No, it will not delete any files from your Mac drive, it will just organise all files in contigious memory location in Mac disk.

How do you actually defrag a Mac?

Stellar Drive Defrag is a recommended third party tool for Mac defragmentation by expert. This tool helps to reduce the amount of file system fragmentation on your OS X drive by defragging files, metadata, and free space. You can set this software to get email notifications automatically, after completion of a task. This tool has advanced algorithms for Quick drive defragmentation. You can perform defragmentation process on Mac boot volume by creating bootable DVD.  This Mac disk defrag tool has safe and dedicated mechanisms to fix fragmentation issues on your Mac.

Create bootable DVD with the help of Stellar Drive Defrag:-

1. Run Stellar Drive Defrag utility and click the ‘Continue’ button.

2. From the ‘Select Source’ section, choose the Boot Volume of your Mac system.

3. The ‘Create Bootable DVD’ window will be displayed , click ‘continue’.

4. Click the button ‘Choose’ to select the destination location, at which you want to save the Disk Image file.

5. Once the image file gets created, click the button, ‘Burn DVD’

6. You can easily defrag Mac boot volume with the help of bootable DVD.

If you take precautions before defragmentation of your Mac , you can save both money and time. There will be no chance of any kind of data loss.

Note: Mac’s with SSD drives should NOT use any kind of defragment software, only those with normal 5400-7200rpm mechanical hard drives.

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Guest article written by: Jyoti Kumari is a Mac user and believes in making life better with latest and useful technology in Mac. Want to share ideas and research on Mac utilities to Defragment Mac and optimize Mac drive.

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Guest article written by: Jyoti Kumari is a Mac user and believes in making life better with latest and useful technology in Mac. Want to share ideas and research on Mac utilities to Defragment Mac and optimize Mac drive.

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2 thoughts on “Precautions before defragmenting Mac”

  1. I would honestly like Apple to help us poor users into this process. Like a ‘one button’ click that would perform all the steps you mentioned. I don’t know if it’s just me be I kind of cringe every time I’m told to ‘back up’ my Mac before doing an action. Is it that risky? brr 🙂

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