What's causing fragmentation of system's metadata files?

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Guest

Hi All

I'm just wondering what's causing deep HD metadata files fragmentation here
lately. I was pointing on some new software I had installed recently but they
aren't the culprit (uninstalled them for testing but fragmentation persists
from time to time). Is there any way to find out what's causing the metadata
fragmentation? I run PerfectDisk frequently and never had this problem before.

Thanks
 
Metadata is information about information! Metadata is any extra information
about a file.

A good example of this is all the user input that a person can add about
music and videos. If you have a lot of music on your computer, and you have
a media player set to download "additional" information from the internet,
this is added as metadata.

Seeing as how the metadata is called up infrequently, I only perform a boot
time defrag about once a month to sort it all out. It will start fragmenting
again almost immediately.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
Mark,

Are you by chance running McAfee 2007? There is a known issue with this
software that causes excessive metadata fragmentation. McAfee supposedly
has an update that addresses this issue.

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows File System

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a
commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.

Want to email me? Delete ntloader.
 
Thanks Richard for your reply,
I asked this because I perform defrag routines quite often (every 5 days)
with PerfectDisk. However, the point is that about 1 month back approx. I'm
forced to make off-line defrags (after a system reboot) so perfectdisk can
arrange the metadata files which are managed by the system only. I noticed a
permanent fragmentation of such system files since 1 month back. As I said, I
never needed to defrag those files before, just had to make regular defrags
without rebooting because metadata files never were a problem. The time this
issue first appeared agrees when I installed WindowsLiveMessenger8 and Opera9
softwares (I blamed them for the problem) so I uninstalled them temporarily
for testing purposes but nothing changed and reinstalled them again.

I think that 'something' somewhere into my files is causing the rapid
fragmentation of 'metadata' files but don't know how to identify it :(

Thanks again
 
Thanks Greg for your reply,

No, I'm not running McAfee2007.
I asked this because I perform manual defrag routines quite often (every 5
days) with PerfectDisk. However, the point is that about 1 month back approx.
I'm forced to make off-line defrags (after a system reboot) so perfectdisk
can arrange the metadata files which are managed by the system only. I just
noticed a permanent fragmentation of such system files since 1 month back. As
I said, I never needed to defrag those files before, just had to make regular
defrags without rebooting because the metadata files never were a problem.
The time when this issue first appeared coincides when I installed
WindowsLiveMessenger8 and Opera9 softwares (I blamed them for the problem) so
I uninstalled them temporarily for testing purposes but nothing changed and
reinstalled them again.

I think that 'something' somewhere into my files is causing the rapid
fragmentation of 'metadata' files lately but don't know how to identify it :(

Thanks again
 
Found the culprit! WindowsLiveMessenger installs a new service 'Messenger
Sharing USN Journal Reader' which messes up with the 'C:\$Extend\$UsnJrnl:$J'
metadata system file. I've just disabled this WLM service.
 
Found the culprit! WindowsLiveMessenger installs a new service 'Messenger
Sharing USN Journal Reader' which messes up with the 'C:\$Extend\$UsnJrnl:$J'
metadata system file. I've just disabled this WLM service.
 
Good to hear! Thanks for coming back with this tidbit of information.

--

Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
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