iDefrag Reviews

He might as well, seems to have little to loose at this point.

macOS does some level of defragmenting automatically, however when working with very large files, things can still get fragmented (there's a short article about that here - http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac/how-defrag-speed-up-mac-os-x-2016-3600241/). In addition, with larger hard drives, fragmentation is experienced less as there is more overhead to work with when creating new files.

With that being said, if your hard drive is running low on disk space (less than say 20%), fragmentation does have a tendency to occur more as new files are essentially squeezed into whatever available disk space there is - even if that results in fragmentation.

Finally, as you said, there is no point in defragging a SSD - in fact doing so can actively harm the drive and reduce it's life span. With most Macs offering either full SSD or Fusion Drives (SSD/HDD hybrids - that also don't benefit from defragging) dedicated defragmenting tools, such as iDefrag, are becoming less and less needed.

They are aware of this issue. If you contact their support team they'll send you a new license key that solves this problem.

I was using iDefrag and iPartition for about 5 or more years.

The upgrade price from version 3 ( my last upgrades ) was really not fair.

The developer was extremely arrogant, in our email exchanges. Must be his Scottish background.

I have given up on this developer and his software since TechToolPro 9 can do all that and more.

I had a similar experience. I purchased the previous version at full retail. Although it worked OK on smaller volumes, it corrupted the directories of my larger volumes badly enough that Disk First Aid and DiskWarrior (then a 32-bit app) could not repair them. I was able to reproduce corruption consistently and sent the developer my logs. I ended up wasting a lot of time on this, hoping the problem would be fixed. When that didn't happen, I requested a refund. I never received that refund.

I would be interested in giving iDefrag another chance, but am not willing to spend another $20 for the opportunity to waste more time on it in the hope that the large-volume directory corruption issues have been resolved by now. I asked the developer if he'd be willing to issue me the 5.x upgrade in lieu of the never-issued $40 refund, and all the time I wasted dealing with, and reporting on, the directory corruption problems, but was similarly refused.

So I have been recommending to all my clients that they simply copy their data to a new drive (and then back again, if necessary) as a much safer (and frequently faster) way of defragmenting.

With the new Apple File System, this utility becomes useless, anyway.

I'm not sure why you aren't able to download, but I wouldn't go on the recent reviews here.

The broken license file issue (from before 5th April 2015) is awkward to explain in detail without going into the workings of our copy protection, which I'm sure you will understand is not something that we want to do here. It does, however, only affect those customers who purchased or were given a free upgrade before 5th April 2015, and the solution is just to re-license the software.

If you *are* affected by that issue, please see our support site for more instructions:

https://coriolis-systems.com/support/2016/4/my-idefrag-5-license-issued-5-april-2015-wont-work

@ Coriolis Systems: Thanks for your reply. The download finally worked today. My iDefrag 5 license is dated September 11, 2015, so it should fall outside the limits of the "broken" license problem. I guess I'll give it a try—on a test partition. If it works I'll report back here. As I will do if it doesn't work. ;-) It may be a few days as I'm still running in OS X 10.9.5, where I'm still using iDefrag 2.2.8. I have upgraded to version 5 for Yosemite and El Capitan, but do not yet work in those systems on a regular basis. By the way, now that I look at it, the jump from version 2.x directly to version 5 is a bit confusing. It made me wonder if I had missed a few upgrades. I looked into it on your web site and discovered I had missed nothing. Still, the jump from 2 to 5 is puzzling.

The "jump" from version 2 to version 5 is only a jump if you aren't Japanese. (Incidentally, this is a very common reason for jumps in version numbers; sometimes it makes sense to release new major versions in some markets and not others. In this particular case, it happened because our Japanese distributor was selling boxed copies, and some of the version 2 updates that were free outside of Japan necessitated updated CD/DVDs for compatibility with new machines, hence new boxes, hence a major version update.)

The licensing problem only affects some customers, and was mentioned in the release notes (it's even written just above the comments here!) as well as in a support article, here:

https://coriolis-systems.com/support/2016/4/my-idefrag-5-license-issued-5-april-2015-wont-work

You had the same licensing problem last year! I've still got your emai with a newer (?) license PNG:
Your iDefrag 5 License (an apology) 3/4/2015.
Nice product but your licensing schema is a mess guys!

Oh, and the last version crashes when attempting to update from that older version! I sent a report via your reporting system two days ago, nothing back. So yeah, messy, very messy.

You shouldn't need to defragment an SSD. The most likely explanation for the space going down while you were deleting files is that something else was busy creating or extending other files. As for the "out of memory" message, that does seem odd; you’d have to have an awful lot of software open at the same time to get that on a modern Mac.

The background to this is that this user has an wanadoo.fr e-mail address, and right now, Orange, whose servers are used for both orange.fr and wanadoo.fr e-mail addresses, are silently dropping e-mail from us for some reason.

We know *for certain* that the necessary e-mail is getting to their mail servers properly, so we know *for certain* that the problem is at Orange.

While we’re sorry that we weren’t able to deal with this customer’s problem any faster, we would strongly encourage users with orange.fr and wanadoo.fr e-mail addresses to (a) get in touch with Orange/Wanadoo and let them know about this problem, and (b) to provide us with alternative contact details as soon as possible so that this problem can be resolved.

I’ll finish by saying that I think it’s quite unfair to rate our software on the basis of the poor performance of a free e-mail provider, which is what has happened here. But MacUpdate users will, hopefully, read our remarks and understand the situation.

For what I blame you, it is your lack of fast communication! It was necessary to you 9 days to find a solution. You had asked me for another email address than I gave you after 3 days. As customer, I did not put 9 days to pay you in total safety for you by CB. Hope I am very clear!?

We’ve already apologised for not dealing with your situation faster, but as we have repeatedly told you, you would have had your license details immediately were it not for the actions of your mail provider, orange.fr, and we think it’s quite wrong of you to give our software a low mark because of a problem with your e-mail provider.

Orange.fr ... low mark ??? Are you crazy !!! When I paid Upgrade iDefrag, I also bought another sofware and have had no problems as always. You are therefore the only ones having this problem. It is doubtful!
I do not like the way you talk to a customer who is very disrespectful. I am the asshole, guilty of everything!? You are not a master and I not a student at school.
Good advice : You should change professions.
This is the last time I buy a Coriolis product and as a journalist in France, I will know how you treat your customers ...

Pour les lecteurs français : Je précise qu'à la validation de mon achat, le site Coriolis marquait 'que leur serveur pouvait rencontrer des problèmes...'. Je n'ai pas fait de capture d'écran mais j'ai trouvé cela très curieux.
Enfin les propos du développeur qui ose parler d'Orange comme un fournisseur 'bas de gamme' alors qu'elle est 7e mondiale... laisse voir le mépris qu'il porte à ses clients en reportant les fautes sur ceux-ci !
Bref, futur client... passez votre chemin.

This is such a drag. Reading thru one guy’s problems with Coriolis that ought to be conducted by email. This site, here, is for reviews and comments on the app. Duh.

I ended up downloading it from this site and installing it. It works fine.

We’re very sorry to hear that you had problems as a result of the license issue, but we suspect that the disk *was* repairable — though the problem may very well not have been filesystem corruption, which obviously means that disk repair utilities won’t be of use.

We’d very much like to hear more about what actually happened; please do get in touch if you haven’t already.

Finally, to anyone else who thinks they have a serious problem after using one of our products: don't wipe your disk or reinstall from a backup without talking to us first! Often the problem you’re having is not as severe as you think.

I had the same problem. A new start was no longer possible. I started my MacBook Pro in safe mode and then I could start again normally.

I really can't add anything at this point. I started iDefrag and checked up on it hours later to find that it had crashed. I'll search for a crash report and send it to you if I find one. Maybe there'll be something useful in it that can help you.

Same here.

Sorry about this. Please can you e-mail the crash report directly to us at help@coriolis-systems.com?

I have the same exact problem also. Tried on two different external drives with the same results. Already sent a report to the Coriolis devs so hope there is a resolution soon.

I have the EXACT same problem. iDefrag v5.0 crashes when doing a full defrag, and I cannot send crash reports.

I'm so glad I upgraded to v5.0 :D

We’re aware of this problem and we’re looking into it as a matter of urgency. We’ll post more when we have a solution.

> Last up-to-date version running just fine under Yosemite 10.10.3 was 1.7.3.

Version 2.2.8, which can be seen in previous comments here, is the most recent version before 5.0.

The last version was 2.2.8. That's the one I have installed. Not sure how they got to 5! There was no 3 or 4. The upgrade is just $19.95.

Mea culpa. I’m running 2.2.8 as well. Was looking at my information stored on 1Password before writing the comment. Anyways, I still feel that the upgrade price isn’t justified for the tiny changes made here. Sorry.

2.2.8 actually has a number of problems on Yosemite. The major ones are:

Quick (online) mode doesn't work properly.
The reboot-and-defragment mode won’t work.
The Create Boot Disk option will produce a boot disk that won’t work.

For some people, these aren’t a huge problem — it depends on how you’re using iDefrag — and if you don’t think the new features are worth upgrading then that’s fine, stick with the old version.

I should add that fixing the above three items (particularly the Create Boot Disk and reboot-and-defragment options) was a *lot* of work. I know they might look like little things on paper, but reboot-and-defragment on Yosemite works rather differently (under the covers) to the way it worked on previous iterations of Mac OS X.

What's New:
Improved support for Retina displays.

The Retina display is on the MacBook Pro (which has an SSD drive) and on the 5K iMac (which has a Fusion Drive — part SSD drive).

From what I understand, SSD drives should never be defragmented. Why is this a feature?

I've been using this app for years and really like it, but only need to use it occasionally. To be honest, the upgrade price of $20 (half price) seems a bit steep.

@Mikebenda: It is true that the built-in devices on the Retina systems are SSDs, but that doesn’t preclude attaching spinning disk storage to them (e.g. via Thunderbolt).

As for saying that SSDs “should never be defragmented”, that isn’t quite our position, but we certainly wouldn’t recommend defragmenting SSDs. See https://coriolis.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/articles/200392472-Should-I-defragment-my-SSD-

Defragmenting Fusion Drives is an interesting question. I’m far from certain whether it’s worthwhile or not; the Fusion Drive is quite an unusual storage device in many respects. It certainly doesn’t hurt, but I’m not sure whether it helps either. If I had the time I might try measuring it.

Thanks for clearing that up. Defragmenting external drives certainly makes sense.

OK, so first off, let’s not beat about the bush here. Apple made a lot of changes to the boot process in Yosemite, as well as some to code signing, and those affected iDefrag rather more than other developers’ applications because of what it does. Some of those changes weren’t present in earlier seeds, and what with a house move and a cock-up from British Telecom that meant they cut our Internet connection off early (which left us using 3G mobile Internet), we were rather restricted in the amount of testing we could do prior to the Yosemite release.

On top of that, Apple back-ported some of the code signing problems into 10.9.5, so we had to release updates for all of our previous products to make them work there.

Additionally, there were some regulatory changes (PCI-DSS and the European Union’s VAT changes) that kicked in on the 1st of January that we had to deal with — and in terms of the VAT changes we’ve actually been helping HMRC (and other businesses).

As far as iDefrag 5 being dependent on the website, that isn’t actually all that unusual. What’s unusual is that we have so much external pressure to release iDefrag 5 before we were good and ready — this doesn’t happen to most other application developers because their software isn’t as low-level and so they typically don’t need to release updates to cope with new versions of OS X. The reason it’s tied to the new website is that the website is where the implementation of the licensing system sits. The new website implements the new image-based licensing system. The old one does not, and it would have been difficult to shoehorn it in to what had become an accretion of old and rather crufty code. The old site was built with PHP, C (yes, C), some Python servers to take on background tasks for the PHP, various scripts and a large smattering of Apache rewrite rules (including some that rewrite via C programs).

So, you might well say that we dropped the ball, that we should have been ready when Apple released Yosemite, etc…, etc…, but the reality is that iDefrag 5 (and the new website) have been a lot of work at a time when we’re short-handed and in spite of a number of things that have made life harder for us. Looking back (iDefrag 5 is now released), I don't see how we could have got to where we are now any faster than we did.

I stand corrected and also very humbled, my apologies to you and your team.
I now understand a little more of the background to all of this and know that after all your other problems the website was causing issues, as I conversed with you through Twitter this very morning.
I have now bought and downloaded the upgrade which is running fine, in fact I am just about to use it for the first time.
To reiterate, my apologies for my comments which were made in ignorance of the facts, but I believe that I was only voicing what many users may have been thinking as I am sure you would agree, a maintenance app such as iDefrag is sorely missed when it's not available, this is not just a case of impatience. Notwithstanding, I commend you for the attempts at keeping things going with the series of beta issues.

Hilbo keep in mind that not everyone updates when a major new OS comes out. There is currently a large percentage of people not on Yosemite. I only installed the update a few weeks ago. Holding off on major OS updates is usually a good strategy anyways.

Honestly, I found Coriolis defrag version 2 a huge waste of money and a huge waste of time running the defrag programme not only in Mavericks and also Yosemite.

The moment after you defrag a the hard drive and start to use it by adding or deleting files the hard drive is fragmented, again.

Also the upgrade price to version 5 is not worth it considering the ever changing unix system of OS Yosemite.

When ever i get silly thoughts about buying these types of programmes I think of my wife because she simply uses her computer day in and day out and never buying or running any commercial disk repair programmes. She only uses Apple's Disk Utility to repair permissions and repair disk. She also notes that Apple's update programmes does all that for her. She may be correct.

What a Day! after the website had been sorted and I'd managed to actually download the App, it crashed on me mid-defrag!, clicked the button to send the report to Coriolis and that crashed!, so, I copied the whole report to the clipboard to send an email to them, but now can't find their support address.
Think it's going to be back to Drive Genius!

all I see are 'excuses'-not very *professional*-WAIT, work the kinks out with OS 10.10. get your ISP troubles worked out and THEN release iDefrag 5. Blaming others for your problems....so any way i have 2.2.4, which i last upgraded to 2.2.8-but my password to Coriolis is not working and I've received no new password from them -not even in spam-cant even upgrade

@Hilbo60: I've made our e-mail address more obvious on our website. As for the crash reporter, I’m not sure why that happened, but I have to say that I’m intending to replace the crash reporter with something better as soon as I get the time (the only reason this didn’t happen for the 5.0.0 release was that I didn’t think the large number of people clamouring for Yosemite support would want to wait longer for this change).

@Mcd3: There’s just no pleasing some people.

I just wanted to set the record straight on what actually happened and why it “took so long”. And actually, we *did* do what you suggest (wait, work out kinks, then release), so I'm not sure what basis you have for your criticism. That Hilbo60 and a couple of others have seen crashes is unfortunate — we have been running a public beta since December, and I think we had pretty much everything that was reported to us ironed out for the release (give or take… e.g. I know there’s a problem with tooltips flashing inexplicably under certain circumstances). It is, however, perhaps unsurprising that when the number of users running a piece of software suddenly multiplies by a significant factor, you see additional problems that weren't apparent previously. We’ll get the crash logs, look at what went wrong and see where we go from there.

Also, we don’t send “spam”, which is probably why you don’t have any from us.

As far as lost sets of log-in details go, it’s really up to you to keep track of them, and while we’re happy to help locate your details for you if you do lose them, you can’t really blame us if you’re unable to upgrade because you’ve lost them. If you are in that situation, please e-mail help@coriolis-systems.com and we’ll get back to you with the necessary information, though note we have quite a large support queue at the moment, so you’ll be in for a bit of a wait.

Would iDefrag 2.2.8 run on Yosemite?

I see no way to login to my account and download version 2.2.8 as I have done previously with 2.x releases.

No you should not. When you purchased, you likely had to give an email address and created a login. If you go here:
https://secure.coriolis-systems.com/login.php

login, once in, are able to redownload all your purchased and registered products. These are the full versions, not the demo. The demo will NOT upgrade a registered copy.

( addon to previous message) I purchased iDefrag 2.0 back in March 2010, I've gotten every 2.x.x update since then, no charge, by logging into my account as described previously.

Thanks for the information. All is well.

No you should not. When you purchased, you likely had to give an email address and created a login. If you go here:
https://secure.coriolis-systems.com/login.php

login, once in, are able to redownload all your purchased and registered products. These are the full versions, not the demo. The demo will NOT upgrade a registered copy.

Mcr, thank you for your answer, but I am talking about the registered 2.2.4 version. There is an embedded update checker/installer: iDerfag->Check for Updates->Upgrade Now (from 2.2.4 to 2.2.8) and it does not work - the upgrade process destroys the original app.

Same here. I'm on OSX 10.9.4 and I can't launch the app anymore after updating from the menu bar within iDefrag (legal, paid version).

The "sort files by type" is a feature that preys upon those like yourself who assume "files in order" is better without any evidence.

Look at it this way, OS X is based upon open source BSD Unix, and if Unix required defragging, someone would have added it. But wait, defragging IS built in to BSD Unix! "Hot File Adaptive Clustering" moves commonly used files to a "Hot Zone" on the drive for faster access. OS X also uses on-the-fly defragmentation to defrag files smaller than 20 MB. HFS+ employs "delayed allocation" which combines small allocations to one large contiguous allocation for a given file.

As a result of all these optimizations OS X volumes do not suffer fragmentation significant enough to affect performance.

Soon this entire defrag debate will be moot, as fragmentation doesn't matter on SSDs and garbage collection is built into OS X. Hopefully users know that defragging an SSD potentially hurts performance and reduces SSD lifespan.

Isn't wiping one's drive disk and reinstalling an OS the ultimate defragging? That is my understanding anyway. If that's not the case, please enlighten me -- I say this earnestly. Are you intimating then that restoring your files from a back up caused the fragmentation problems?

You would think so, right? It was not in my case. It probably would have been if I also reinstalled all my software, etc. But since I restored from a backup using Carbon Copy Cloner, it seems to have moved everything over in the state it was. I think CCC does a block by block copy, and restores the same way. I'm not exactly sure. When I checked the drive in iDefrag, the newly restored drive was fragmented. Not as bad as it was (it was really bad to start with), but it still showed quit a bit. It only had to run about 8 hours, and the performance improvements where worth it.

RN, Thanx for the reply. That was my hunch, that restoring ala CCC might reintroduce some of the fragmentation of the original file system.

A file to file restore after a disk reformat will not cause defragmentation, files are copied back sequentially and should be placed on the disk in order, like dominoes. A block to block restore will restore in the EXACT SAME LAYOUT as the original, hence 'block to block', so whatever fragmentation state of the original, the restoration will duplicate.

So, yes, typically a reformat and restore is the ultimate defragmentation, PROVIDED you do a file restore, not a block to block. And CCC provides you a choice to do file or block copy. (Note a block copy is ONLY allowed when the target disk/partition size t is equal or larger than the source disk/partition size.