How do you defrag a hard drive on NAS?
It appears that any hard drive on a NAS network uses some mysterious type of formatting. How do you defrag it? How do you recover files in an event the drive is unreadable?

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It depends on what type of NAS you are using. NAS mount points can be presented via standard Unix or Windows servers. The underlying file system is the OS native file system (UFS, NTFS). You can use standard OS-based defrag to defragment the underlying file system. If you are using an appliance-based NAS solution (MAXXAN, NetApp, etc.), then you would use the utilities that are available with that solution.

You can back up NAS mount points with NDMP backup, or back up the underlying LUNS via a standard backup utility.

For more information, read expert Randy Kerns' advice on how to defrag a hard drive.

This was first published in November 2004