Defrag Novell Drives?

[Schui]

Our Novell servers are running low on space... There's a lot of wasted space due to the cluster sizing...

Is it possible to Defrag a Novell Drive..?
or Does it do it automatically..?

Kind regards

schui

[MacGyver]

You can't defrag a Netware volume because the file system is a completely different animal. Basically the only way to "defrag" a volume is explained here: http://support.novell.com/cgi-bin/search/searchtid.cgi?/2912014.htm - backup and restore from tape. Defragging a Netware volume is not necessary.

You'd be better off exploring some other options to increase disk space, like doing a PURGE /A from the root of each volume. However this is a temporary measure, as the volume will fill up with old deleted files in short order. IMO, slack space is not a big issue these days with the price of HD's being low.

Here is a quick lesson on how Netware handles disk space: On my server, I have 25% free space on two volumes. Of that 25% free space, are deleted files that have not yet been purged. Only about 3% of the total space is truly "free". About half the volume is compressed, which is an automatic feature of Netware that compresses files that haven't been accessed in a while. Do you have compression turned on? The nice thing is, I can recover any of those deleted files easily using Salvage. Netware automatically cleans off the oldest deleted files to make way for more. So in reality a PURGE /A doesn't help you at all.

You can right click on a netware volume in Network Neighbourhood and see a cute pie chart that illustrates this, under the NETWARE VOLUME STATISTICS tab.

From the server console, do a LOAD SERVMAN and go to Volume Information. This will give you a true number of how much disk space you actually have in use, not counting old deleted files that haven't been purged yet. Based on this number you can determine if it's time to drop in some more HD space.

You should never let a Netware volume drop below 10% free space or you are asking for trouble.