There’s an old saying, Lisa - History makes a great teacher, but a lousy master.
In the bad old days when disks were slow and file systems were less efficient, defragging was a good way of getting a bit of speed back. Advances in both disk specifications and file systems has greatly reduced the potential benefits of defragging.
In fact, if you have a solid state disk (SSD) it is particularly recommended to NOT defrag, as there is a finite limit on the number of times that each storage it can be written to.
CTM’s inbuilt snapshot optimization is, IMHO, a more than adequate replacement for defragging, particularly as the snapshot contains the actual data, not the windows file system.
Hi Lisa, I’m afraid your dillema is not a dillema at all and your concerns are typical of relatively new users (no disrespect meant here of course). Most modern hard disks require very little defragmentation if any at all - only once every 6 months at the most and that is with normal computer usage. You’ll find that any speed benefits are practically non-existent when you defrag every month - unless of course you constantly install and uninstall software on a daily basis. Under normal usage conditions defraging very frequently is a bit of a placebo, it just makes the user feel better and in the long run you’ll be shortening the lifespan of your drive if you defrag frequently. There are no real-life speed benefits to it, at least none that can be perceived by a human and without the use of benchmarks.
With solid state disks defraging is not needed at all and the Windows automatic defragmation schedule for the SSD should be turned off altogether. Again you will just end up wearing the drive down and reducing its lifespan for no good reason. Windows 7 normally detects without any user intervention if an SSD is installed, and disables auto defrag for the SSD.
