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Do old files need "refreshing"?

M

MikeFeury

Junior Member
Hi All,

You know how files on an old floppy are often corrupted? Can the same happen on a HD?

I've heard that the magnetic 'signal' [whatever stores the data on the platters] can deteriorate over time, which sounds feasible. If true, this would endanger files which don't move, eg archives.

Wondering if I should alternate defrags between say Windows defrag and Norton's, so the files get physically shifted around regularly.

Thanks 🙂
 
Hmmmm, I've never heard of this before on a hard drive. I think that if you are using the drive and it shouldn't matter. I do not believe you need to go to far as to defrag. I have had drives that I haven't used for a long time, and all the data on them turned out to be fine.
 
The additional shielding of a hard drive would make the process of degredation slower than with a floppy. To protect important data, power up the drive from time to time and run scandisk. This will 'refresh' the file allocation tables, which is the difference between data and random strings of 1s and 0s.
 
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