Do I need to defrag the hard disk even if I format the hard disk

Restoring images
Macrium Reflect restores disks or their partitions exactly as they were when the backup was taken

The partition or disk restored will be restored exactly as was.

Why do you think your disk needs defragmentation? Under Win 10, normally defrag is automatic, and there is little defragmentation.

Agreed. Defragging may not be necessary unless one is adding, deleting or moving files a lot. Used to be it was necessary as drives and Operating Systems were slower and had less capacity so defragging could make more storage available by moving parts of files closer together which also improved access speed.

Are you saying restoration is file by file?

And yes, I should have been more exact in referring to the used part of the disk.

Granted the omission of page and hibernation files.

sam9 said:

... I can create and then restore the image in place of defragmentation. This will serve two purpose. One, a backup will be ready and second, there won't be any need for defragmentation.

From the Macrium forum...

This is not correct. A restored image to a partition the same size or greater than the original is exactly the same as it was when it was imaged. A disk image is an exact cluster by cluster representation of the file system and the restore puts every cluster back to exactly the same sector offset as it was when the image was created. The exception is if you shrink a file system during a restore, in this case the file system is actually defragged 'on the fly' and there is no fragmentation whatsoever in the restored file system.

Kind Regards

Nick - Macrium Support

https://forum.macrium.com/Topic10633.aspx

sam9 said:

Now this is different what the NavyLCDR has replied. I think, we need to have more discussions and responses on this matter because both replies are as per macrium but differ to each other. May be we are understanding these differently.

@NavyLCDR has been using Macrium longer than I have, but I don't think 'intelligent sector copy' works exactly as he understands it. To find out I have run a test. I made an image of a system with a 4% fragmented C: drive then restored it. From a Command Prompt (Admin) a fragmentation analysis can be run with this command:

DEFRAG /A /V C:

I have attached reports from before and after the restore. They show that the fragmentation is near enough the same. Some of the differences can probably be explained by the hiberfil.sys and swapfile.sys not being included in the Macrium image.

Before:

Files:
Fragmented files = 198
Total file fragments = 1653

Restored:

Files:
Fragmented files = 202
Total file fragments = 1598

PS: Apparently defragmenting a drive can dramatically increase the size of the next Incremental (at least, in V6 - and there's no evidence I can find to suggest that has changed in V7).

...this morning's incremental backup was 7Gb, whereas the rest of the week was 500Mb or less.

...did your computer run a defrag between Reflect running both images? A defrag changes locations of data which causes pretty much any imaging program to back up the moved data...

...I dug into the "optimize" settings and found win10 is running it weekly. Last run was the evening of the 8th, which matches to my 7+Gb incremental image made on the morning of the 9th....

https://forum.macrium.com/Topic5599.aspx