5. Maintaining Your System

Defragmenting the hard drive
As data is written and retrieved from the hard drive, data fragmentation can become a system-slowing problem. Think of your hard drive as a giant cupboard, filled with a variety of canned goods. The way a hard drive accesses the information is much the same way we would choose a specific can from a pantry. The system issues a command for a specific piece of data, at this point the hard drives stylus scans the disk to locate the data…much the same way our brain would issue a command to retrieve a specific can of corn from the cupboard. Since writing and retrieving data is an ongoing process, often pieces of data can become separated from similar data clusters. The result is a slowing down of the retrieval process because the retrieval device must scan the entire disk surface to locate the needed data. Think of computer defragmentation as a re-organizational process, not unlike the process of grouping similar canned goods in a cupboard.

By putting the corn with corn, beans with beans, etc. you can reduce the amount of time it takes to gather the necessary elements to make that 3 bean casserole. The windows disk defragmentation tool can be accessed in: Start/Programs/Accessories/ System Tools/Disk Defragmenter

Get into the habit of doing this at least once a week, as it will make a big difference in your systems performance.

Scandisk
Drive errors are usually minor problems that affect a tiny area of the hard drive preventing the storage of data in that location. Bad sectors (unable to hold data), lost clusters (clusters on the hard drive that are perceived as being used, but aren’t), and cross-linked files (two or more files that are trying to use a single cluster) are the most common errors that one might encounter on a hard drive.

These errors are usually minor and can be easily repaired by running a simple disk management utility such as Windows Scandisk. Running Scandisk on a regular basis (once a week) will help to maintain the hard drive health and performance as well as reducing the risk of a complete disk failure. To access Scandisk in Windows:

Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Scandisk

Disk Cleanup
A disk loaded with unnecessary data will reduce the overall performance of the drive itself.

Often, a hard drive gets loaded down with deleted or forgotten files that can collectively cause the hard drive to work harder accessing the needed data. Running a disk cleanup utility will allow you to visually assess the drives content and select what does not need to be kept on the hard drive. To access Windows disk cleanup utility: Start/Program Files/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Cleanup

Navigating through the various cleanup options will allow you to not only clean out temporary files, but also allow you to view the currently installed program files, and allow you to delete and regain some disk space by clearing out what you don’t need or use anymore.

Back Up
One of the most overlooked and under considered facets of the computer world is back up. Nothing is worse than losing an entire project of songs in the blink of an eye, and although recording audio with a computer has empowered the user with a whole new level of muscle and flexibility, it has also left the careless extremely vulnerable to disaster. There are so many cost efficient backup solutions available (CDR, Jaz, DVD RAM, ORB, Magneto Optical, Data Dat, Zip) that anyone recording data on a computer should be able to find a solution that will work for them.

In addition to the standard process of backing up, technology has also provided software like Dantz’s Retrospect which will allow you to create a perfect copy of your hard drive in it’s current functioning state. This is handy to restore your system back to its previous functioning condition if you experience corruption of Windows files or other extreme file failure. There are a number of these utility programs available, so do some investigating.

Developing a backup routine is a discipline that is well rewarded the first time you accidentally delete a group of tracks from a project or discover that an entire project directory has become corrupt. Be smart, back up!