Should a used clone be rebuilt
 

I had to send my mac in for service, I already have a bootable clone, so I made new 2nd bootable clone and erased my HD and installed a clean OS. Meantime I was using my old bootable drive to boot into another machine.

When I got my mac back I erased the HD and cloned the clone back to the internal HD. As far as I understand it this would have the effect of defragging all the files as it copied them back to the Mac.

My question is, now that my normal working bootable clone has been used to effectively defrag the HD, would it now be a good idea, to erase the bootable clone and reclone my newly defragged HD so that they are both in the same state.

I hope this made sense.

It doesn't really matter, Fred. You can do that, but the state of fragmentation is sort of irrelevant to whether the drives have the same data.

Hi thanks for the reply, yes I just wanted to check though that SD still does put related files together when making a new clone and that I'm not imagining it.

We don't work at a low level, and we are not controlling where things are on the drive - that's up to the OS.

Hi, I worded that badly, instead of 'related' I meant to say 'fragmented'. In other words I just wanted to check that when SD is copying a clone to a clean drive and not smart updating, that it really does gather all the various pieces of a file, and put them all together again.

Yes, that's generally inherent in writing a file to a blank drive. (I have a white paper on the SuperDuper page that discusses fragmentation.)