Where is that documentation?

It is a Friday afternoon and your boss rolls into your office and asks you to dig up the specifications on a project you haven't seen in 2 years. You remember all the emails emails, Word documents, and signed papers from the client, so you start looking through your file cabinets and all through your computer to see what you can find. Before you know it you have spent 2 hours of your afternoon just looking for documentation on one project.

Strangely enough your computer gets itself in similar situations as well. It will get loaded down with requests and decide to leave bits and pieces of your documents laying around your hard-drive instead of storing them in the same location. When this happens your computer takes longer and longer to recall where it stored all the little bits of your documents. The problem is your computer is a big baby and will not clean itself up, so you are stuck cleaning up the mess.

Disk Defragmenter

The first thing you need to do is reach into your computer cleaning closet and grab the tool to start the job - Disk Defragmenter (DD). I will usually just use this tool to run an analysis on one of my hard-drives and then view the report to look at the list of fragmented files. If I have files that are fragmented into hundreds or thousands of pieces I might decide to defragment (especially if the files are ones that are being used on a regular basis). But say I have a file that has 10,000 fragments and is 1Gb in size and DD isn't defragging the file? Well, then reach back into my cleaning closet for another utility that probably isn't there.

Contig

Contig (at v1.54 at time of writing this) is a single-file defragmenter that is great at defragging files or folders of files. Last time I checked you could get Contig v1.54 here. Now it doesn't have a nice user interface or anything so you will just need to open up the command line for this one.

My contig executable is under my 'C:\Windows\' directory so it falls within my Windows Path. I do this so I do not have to manually go to the directory in DOS where contig is living every time I want to run it. When I want to run contig I always just use 'contig -s' command to deframent anything on my systems. The following line for example would defrag everything under the Software directory on the C drive.

contig -s "C:\Software\*"

Here is a screen shot of a simple contig:

Now stop reading this and go clean up your system!