Topic: Back-up hard drive question...

[Chuck]

How full should I fill 1 TB drives when backing up my music server?
I'm not asking about the server drives. I want to know how much space I should leave for the back-up drives to operate correctly.

Thanks in advance.

[Gordon]

for storage drives it doesn't matter nearly as much as an OS drive.  I still like to leave 10 gigs or so free.

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

The amount of free space shouldn't be measured in GB.

Ideally you should leave about 20% of the total space of the drive free. This is to allow for the OS to defrag the drive as well as a buffer for bad sectors. If it is a backup drive and you won't be writing, erasing, and re-writing data you probably could leave a little less space since the OS won't really have to defrag the drive. For drives that you will be recycling data it is important to leave space for the OS to do it's thing when defraging. Doesn't matter if it's the OS drive or a drive dedicated to data storage.

[Gordon]

or use

http://www.piriform.com/defraggler

to defrag and it doesn't care how much free space there is.