The best defrag is a "streaming" backup, then drive reformat, the a restore. Puts all the ducks in a row. At least it seems to do that.

With three million records - maybe just copying the DBF to a CD - then deleting all the stash and trash related to that DBF - then defrag - then copy back to the drive?

The tags (or IDXs) should be deleted and made anew - maybe?:-)



>>>And, clearly, the defragger ought to be endowed with the logic to use the distributed fragmentation to build a contiguous space sufficient to then let it do the job it needs to do. At least when the free space percentage is better than, say 5% of the drive.
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>>Clearly. If this is what it seems, it indicates a serious limitation in the defragmenter.
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>I think the current defragmenter is just the same old Norton defragmenter which M$ bought for DOS 6 (and drastically reduced its set of features), and wasn't changed too much since. Unless changing for the worse counts.
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>In DOS 6, the defragmenter would consolidate free space. In Windows 9x, I think it still did that, don't remember for sure. Under NT (4.0, w2k, XP) it doesn't do that anymore. It seems to behave as a single-pass optimizer, does what it can, and leaves the rest intact. I often run it two or three times in a row just to consolidate the free space.
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>And I don't think this defragmenter is free - it comes as a computer management tool, ergo, a part of the OS. which is not free.