Routine, planned maintenance can prevent problems or minimize their effects. For example, if there are file system problems, you might not know about them until you restart the computer, when the Chkdsk program tells you that there are errors. Backups can even be corrupt in some situations, because no backup program, including Windows NT Backup, can detect corrupt user data.
Administrators should check both the system and application event logs on a daily basis. Impending file system problems might show up as errors in the system log before the file system is corrupt. Be sure to investigate any messages in the event log from FtDisk or disk device drivers.
Disk fragmentation can cause performance problems. You should consider running a defragmentation program on a regular basis. There are third-party defragmentation utilities that run under Windows NT and can defragment both FAT and NTFS volumes. Be sure to only use utilities that are designed for Windows NT. Microsoft has a directory that contains information about hardware and software programs that are available for Windows NT, including defragmentation utilities. This directory is called InfoSource. For information about InfoSource, see http://www.microsoft.com/infosource.
Create a log book for every computer, which should contain information about the computer's configuration. To make recovery easier, there are several system files that you should back up every time you make certain changes to your Windows NT configuration. For information about these topics, see the section "Maintaining Configuration and Essential System Information" in Chapter 5, "Preparing for and Performing Recovery."