>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.

It would have been possible in DOS, or any other OS which doesn't use a centralized registry and doesn't register all the apps, have special folders and doesn't use other dirty tricks. With NT (....up to XP) it simply doesn't work. You have pieces of OS scattered over all of your partitions, specially if you keep the OS on C:, apps on D:, data on E: - can't reformat and restore D:, because you run a high chance of having to reinstall a lot. Even E: is not quite safe to do this with, because who knows how many apps point to directories there, and how the hell do the Indexing Services work?

>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?:-)

I think Jim Nelson wrote in this very thread that a table copied out and then copied back was more fragmented afterwards than it was before - because it fell into myriad holes, ie. the numerous pieces of incontiguous free space. What you say is a good recipe when the free space is contiguous. Doesn't happen easily with the built-in defragmenter.