Better way to defrag?

[Jayws]

I want to defrag my 3 drives on a weekly basis but automating this process to run at 3am seems to be a PITA with windows XP. I've also heard that other proprietary software may not only be better at scheduling but better at overall performance.

From what I can tell, WinXP's scheduler will allow me to schedule the defragmentation of 1 drive per event. The best way that I can think of doing all three without conflicts and without supervision is to schedule each drive for 3am on a different day of the week from one another. There has to be a better way...

I am also looking for an easy way to do a weekly backup of a select few folders such as My Documents and my FTP share.

[Darur]

I'd recommend JkDefrag (http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/).

Its Open Source, and it will defrag all your volumes by default. Just schedule jkdefragcmd.exe to run at the specified time and intervals you want and you're set.

As for your second question, if you have a Seagate drive, Seagate's Discwizrd utility (available on the website for free) allows for scheduled back-ups I believe, but I'm not certain on that.

[soundbarrier]

You can look into third party automatic defragmenters. Not free, but worth the money if you don't want to deal with the hassles of scheduling defrag events one drive at a time. Although you have the option to set specific schedules, you don't even have to bother. The auto defrag will run automatically whenever there are free idle resources and if the drives are fragmented. These also have other options like VSS-friendly defrag for Vista, MFT resizing etc. With the XP defragger, not only will it not do a full defrag quite often, it does not defrag the MFT and pagefile either if they are fragmented.

As for backups, I am quite sure Acronis True Image does scheduled backups. But again, it's not free.
I have actually used Seagate's DiscWizard to back up my Seagate drive once, but I did it manually, don't recall if it can be scheduled.

[Brian@EWIZ]

diskkeeper

[Perseus]

I'm running Perfectdisk 2008 after running Diskeeper for a good while. PD does schedules, real-time, screensaver, boot-time and based on fragmentation %. So far so good. I'm running VU64 SP1.