NewTek TriCaster 855 - Manual (Page 119)

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You could think of your hard drive as
being like a shelf in your library. As time
goes along, the shelf fills with books.
Some are quite large, others smaller – just
as TriCaster media files may be larger
smaller.
As time goes along, you decide to remove
books you have finished using from the
shelf, in order to make room for new
additions. You remove a book here,
another there, opening up gaps between
the remaining books. This makes some
shelf space available by creating gaps between the remaining books. Sadly, another
large new book may be too big to fit in any one of the gaps.
A foolish librarian might tear the new book into smaller sections, just big enough to fit
into the open spaces on the shelf. This would obviously be unwise. When you wish to
refer to the book later, you will waste a lot of time locating and assembling its sections
before you can access it.
How much better it would be to slide the remaining books closer together, combining all
the free space first. Unfortunately, computers are ‘foolish librarians’. They tend to
want to fill in all the gaps in their storage areas, even if this requires literally shredding
your ‘book’ (in reality large video files from your TriCaster sessions) into tiny fragments.
Defragmenting the storage volume has the same effect as sliding the books together,
resulting in one or more larger gaps. The end result is that TriCaster doesn’t have to
frantically search in many different places to assemble the video streams from your
recorded session.
Hint: Defragmentation can sometimes take considerable time, so it’s not something you
want to begin just before an important event.

Backup or Restore System – A complete set of Backup and Restore features are available
to help in the event of an unforeseen problem.
Figure 98