This week we have a question from Vladimir:

“Hello Steve,
Happy New year to you and all the best in the new 2012.

I’m battling here with fragmentation disk problems and I’m wondering;
Is there a way to run a defragmentation process during night hours when all machines are idling? Can it be scripted so you can add it to a scheduler task?”

Yes…we could just go through the manual steps of creating this scheduled task, but Vladimir wants to know if we can easily script it.

The answer is a definite yes. In fact, it is easier to script this than to suffer through all of the windows and settings of the task scheduler.

To add a scheduled task, you just need to call it like this from the command line:

schtasks /create

Now, of course that needs some more options.

We want it to run only when the computer is idle, and since we want it to run after hours, we want to rule out lunch…so lets tell it to only run after two hours of inactivity.

Here are the options we will need:

/tr = The path to the application to run
/tn = The name of the task
/ru = User to run the task as
/sc = When to run the task
/i = The number of idle minutes to wait

This is what our command to add the task would look like:

schtasks /create /ru system /sc onidle /i 120 /tn Defrag /tr "%systemroot%\system32\defrag.exe c:"

This command line can be translated to:

Create a task named ‘Defrag’ that will run the defrag program under the system account – only when the computer has been idle for 120 minutes

After you run the task, it will add it:

You can verify by browsing over to scheduled tasks:

That is all there is to it. Now when the system is idle for more than two hours, it will start a defrag of the c drive. This syntax works on Windows XP through Windows 7 / 2008.

I have almost 4 years worth of emails in a Gmail account. I have tried using other services, and even ran my own email server – but I always find Google calling me back with their top notch spam protection.

The problem with that is…well I have 4 years worth of emails. Many of them contain serial numbers to products, important answers to customer questions, and stuff that is simply not replaceable. I never trust computers when it comes to keeping my data secure. I always assume that today it is here, and tomorrow it could be gone.

Backups are easy when it is your own system, but when you have all of your email on a service like Gmail it makes it more difficult to make it part of a backup procedure. I started to get worried about losing it all, so for a few weeks now I have been trying to use MS Outlook to download it to a local PST using IMAP. The account has over 30,000 messages, and Outlook always dies at about the 12,000 message mark.

After some digging (About 3 seconds on Google) I found a free utility that will backup your entire Gmail account to a folder.

Let me start out by telling you the best things about it:

1. It is free – I would pay for a pro version if it would automate the process for me

2. It can restore a backed up account to a current email account

3. The backup is stored in standard eml format – This means you can open messages using Outlook express.

You can download the latest version from http://www.gmail-backup.com

Backing up is a simple process. You download the program, enter your account info, and press the backup button. (The hosted version of Gmail is supported too)

A single form is displayed when you launch the application:

Enter your login information, and a destination for the backup files. Click on the backup button.

Once it is finished, it organizes the backups by date in the destination folder you selected:

You may notice the 1969, and 1970 folders – those are from a few improperly formatted email messages that have an invalid date stamp…it is not a bug.

You can view any of them using Outlook Express by double clicking on a message:

This is a fantastic utility and I highly recommend it.