[Info-vax] backup /image on Windows or Unix?

[brendan welch]

On 1/23/2013 9:21 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2013-01-23, Dirk Munk <munk at home.nl> wrote:
>> One of the nicest features of VMS is backup/image. Take a badly
>> fragmented disk as input, and you will get a beautiful structured disk
>> as output, all files contiguous etc.
>>
>> I have always been looking for utilities that can do the same in Windows
>> and Unix, but I never found them.
>>
>
> In Unix land have you considered a dump and restore sequence ?
>
> Simon.
>
Am I missing something here, re Windows?  I have presumed that
the disk defragmenter does the same thing, or nearly the same,
as backup/image on VMS.
Instead of backup/image to a tape, and probably taking the
disk offline, the defragmenter does its work "live", right
on the same disk.  (I admit that if you have a busy, continually
changing disk, that one-time job is getting obsolete
immediately)

On a Windows PC, I have used a freebie from auslogics, simply
because many years ago, it was considered better than
the built-in defragmenter * from Microsoft.  Hopefully, now that
they have gone through the designs of XP and Vista etc.,
Microsoft has incorporated the better design features of its
competition.

* i.e., Start | My Computer | right click on your disk |
Properties } Disk cleanup

and I also add something I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago,
that a continually operating defragmenter, in my experience,
causes a few permanent disk errors.