Location Of Copied Files On Synced Hard Drive

[louiechuckymerr]

Hello, and thanks in advance to anyone willing to give of their time; I
appreciate it. Also, many thanks to the developer of FreeFileSync for creating
an intuitive yet powerful piece of software; it's an excellent program, and
thank you very much. I've been using FreeFileSync for about a month now as a
replacement for SyncBack and I've been nothing but happy with it's
performance. I especially appreciate that it functions as a stand alone
application. Until yesterday I was using it to mirror a 1 TB external hard
drive to another 1 TB external drive bit-by-bit, a maximum 10 GB per session.
Last night I had to reformat one of the drives, so before going to sleep I
started a mirror sync from the unaltered drive (674 GB of data) to the freshly
formatted drive. The session ended recently after 13 hours, 11 minutes, and
everything seemed fine. However, when I went to defragment the newly formatted
drive (using MyDefrag4.3.1) I noticed that, according to MyDefrag's Diskmap,
roughly one-third of the freshly mirrored data was on the inside of the hard
drive and roughly two-thirds of the freshly mirrored data was on the outside
of the hard drive, leaving a large swath of empty space in between. Although
none of the files are fragmented, to run even the "Data Disk Daily" option in
MyDefrag would involve moving about 450 GB of data from the outside of the HD
to the inside of the HD. Hence my question: is there any way to have
FreeFileSync place the copied files in a CONTIGUOUS chunk (starting from the
inside) on the receiving HD? Thanks again for any help.

[Zenju]

Physical placement of files is completely and automatically managed by
internals of the Operating System. From an application point of view there is
not much that could (and should) be done about it. Consequently Windows
practically offers no way to configure this behavior.
(For the record, there is indeed device specific low-level hackery that allows
addressing physical blocks, but it's certainly not for use in a standard file
copy scenario.)

[louiechuckymerr]

Zenju: thank you very much for replying. I think I understand your post. I
asked my original question because I once used SyncBack to do the exact same
thing (copy the entire contents of one of the drives {at the time about 600
GB} to the freshly reformatted second drive) and the files were both
unfragmented AND alphabetically-by-name placed in one contiguous chunk from
the inside to the outside on the mirrored-to drive. Are you typing that this
radical difference in file placement for the (for all intents and purposes)
same operation in FreeFileSync and SyncBack is due to Windows 7 and not to
either of the programs themselves? Thanks for helping me understand.

[Zenju]

FFS v3.14 doesn't control physical placement of files in any way, it even uses
WinAPI's own copy routine. I can't tell where this difference in placement
comes from, but it's almost certainly not due to the way FFS copies files.

[louiechuckymerr]

After wracking what's left of my brain--and taking into account Zenju's
information--I decided to run a couple of tests. Syncing 90 GB of data from an
external hard drive to a second, freshly formatted external hard drive with
FreeFileSync resulted in perfectly defragmented, alphabetical by directory
files that were placed from the inside to the outside of the synced-to disk.
Repeating the test and using MyDefrag to create a Diskmap while
FreeFileSync was running (as I remembered I'd done during the process that was
the reason for my original post), the files were--yep--in two (2)
defragmented, and alphabetical by directory rings, one (1) starting from the
inside of the disk and one (1) starting from the outside of the disk (and
leaving a large swath of empty space in between). Seems that I'm to blame, but
at least a major brain itch has been scratched. Thank you again for taking the
time to help me, Zenju; I really do appreciate your willingness to share
your knowledge.