Customers regularly write in regarding client backups which seem to be
"hung", or backup performance which is slow.  Many times this has to
do with overstuffing of directories or slow CPUs.  But there is one
treatment which I have not seen addressed on the list:
   defragment your hard drive or file system!

From personal experience:  I had been using a tower-style personal computer,
and it seemed awfully sluggish when doing anything.  Disk operations were
"noisy", as the disk seemed very busy.  So I decided to go at it with
Norton Utilities, Speed Disk function.  Norton found that the hard drive
was severely fragmented.  After a full backup, I ran a defrag, which took
some time, given the bad state of things on the disk.  After that was done
I gave the system a try, and found the system performance to subjectively
be about three times faster.  And the disk was very quiet - because the
arm was not frantically running all over the disk surfaces collecting the
disparate pieces of files, which were now contiguous.

Various systems provide various means of degragmentation.  For PC's, you
can run Norton or the like.  For AIX, there is the defragfs command, for
example.  They can make a big difference in general system performance,
and should be considered periodic maintenance tasks.  (Note that performing
a file-oriented copy of a file system to a fresh disk will likewise achieve
degragmentation.)

    Richard Sims, BU