How and why you should rebuild your PS4 database regularly

From PlayStation Universe: "Find out the safe way to rebuild your PS4 database, and why it's something you should do often to improve the performance of Sony's console. Here's a guide on how to rebuild your PlayStation 4 database."

[corroios]

Should do this. I have some of the problems there. My PS4 is old and tons of miles.

[HollowKnight]

You don't need to do this If you have an SSD Installed.

[KingLeil_33]

This article is a ton of hot garbage. I have co-workers in the IT business that have worked at Sony's PS4 repair factory before. The only reason to do a rebuild of your PS4 database is if you are having problems with running many titles. If not, then don't do this. Examine the top comment of the person who did this in the article: he was forced to redownload many game updates, and had other issues costing him a lot of bandwidth.

[corroios]

im having problems running the webrowser, the menu are moving slower...

[medman]

+corroios
I'm not sure about this, or if any of this may relate to the issues here, but I think everyone is having those type issues following one or more of the updates.....

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2...

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2...

[FITgamer]

Delete the browser history, old messages , and old notifications / game invites. All that clutter slows the UI down.

[NapalmSanctuary]

@FITgamer
Apparently you can't delete notifications anymore.

[Overload]

I do this every couple months and I have never had to do any of that. It always fixes judder with the OS. Maybe the guy chose the wrong option or maybe something was wrong with his PS4.

[vikingland1]

@Overload
You are correct. I rebuild my data base monthly when my system is acting up

[bloop]

I rebuild my data base almost monthly too, unintentionally, as my girlfriend keeps pulling out all the bloody plugs in the house and always manages to do it everytime on the rare occasion that I've left the PS4 in rest mode. I've had none of those problems so far either. Except for the mild heart attack I get when the progress bar stops for a bit longer than I think it should.

[il-JumperMT]

I have no bandwidth limit in a 3rd world country...

[NarooN]

Here in a first-world country, bandwidth caps don't exist as a form of practicality, they exist purely because it's a classic form of captialism where it's all about the companies making as much money as possible. Introduce an arbitrary data cap and then charge users extra fees for going over it just because they can. It's even more absurd today when people are looking more to digital entertainment than ever before and thus are doing tons of high-resolution video streaming and game downloading, so they clearly know what they're doing. ISP's in North America are pretty corrupt for the most part.

[danknassty]

It just made me lose all my folders I built. I have 100's of digital purchases (shamefully) and organized them by genre to reduce clutter. Now my homescreen is a clusterf*ck. Wish they had mentioned this.

[4U2NV]

Its true i did this on my ps3 and boy was it a big mistake dont bother trust me. Or if you do back up EVERYTHING to the cloud or usb drive!

[KingLeil_33]

One point: Orbis OS, which is BSD, is the PS4 Operating System. This is a cousin of Linux, and does not need to be defragmented because it is using either UFS or ZFS. Each filesystem is unaffected by fragmentation for the most part. The only situation in which fragmentation can become somewhat problematic for either filesystem is if your disk space is EXTREMELY full, like less than 1GB of storage remaining. Barring this, there should be no reason for thinking that there needs to be a "defrag" of your PS4 drive. So if you keep your disk drive under 90% capacity, you should be ok.

Sources: ExtremeTech on PS4 Orbis OS.
Sources: Google up information on ZFS, UFS, and fragmentation.

[XanderZane]

I thought the database was rebuilt after firmware updates. I guess not.

[rainslacker]

it's rebuilt any time it senses a problem with the file system, typically due to a power failure during rest mode, or botched install.

Performing it regularly is not really necessary, and it can actually cause damage to the file system if it's not absolutely critical. The one you do manually actually changes things, while the one the system does when it senses a problem may not change anything, or only change the thing it finds a problem with....which is why it tends to be quick.

[dantesparda]

It does do it after a firmware update, its just sometimes it does it so fast that you dont even see the rebuilding screen. But its definitely doing it every time.

[XanderZane]

@dantesparda
Ok thanks. I wasn't sure if I was right about that or not. I've seen it happen when the PS4 is suddenly powered off by itself and you turn it back on.

[TheSaint]

Why wouldn't a gamer have unlimited bandwidth?

[XbladeTeddy]

Waste of time, waste of effort. I understand for a PC when you're constantly installing new drivers and hardware updates from many different companies but not for a console.

[LIGATURE]

Yeah the menu thing has become laggy af after these recent updates,so ima wait for another update or two for it to be fixed.i guess😂😂㈳ 4;

[jamstorr86]

Im surprised that there isn't a built in maintenance task to rectify fragmentation of data. Its common sense that if you are adding and removing data a lot that fragmentation creeps in, and performance can be affected.
This could probably apply for all the storage on the disk. you need to run a game from disk but all the data pages are scattered across the disk due to the extents filling up, then performance will be battered.

[Mikey Mike]

Because the PS4 is not using a windows file system....

[jamstorr86]

But surely the same logic applies. You can only write sequentially for so long before it needs to start splitting up data files to various extents on a disk

[4U2NV]

Doesnt matter.. the way hardrives randomly scatter bits of information all over the disk will make it harder to allocate those bits as you install amd remove more files regardless of the file system used

[1Victor]

@mike nice stealth trolling same could be said about Nintendo Sega and all the other system makers.
Just because windows is poorly made with more holes than a colander doesn't mean every electronic have to have it

[nitus10]

Wow so many disagree when you are fully correct.

Since the PS4 runs a variant of FreeBSD which is based on Unix it highly likely it running a Unix journaling filesystem. There is no way Sony is going to run Microsoft's filesystem (ie. NTFS) which would require them paying a license fee to Microsoft.

[rainslacker]

@jam

The file system attempts to put files on the disc sequentially when it's putting them on there. The current windows does this as well to some degree. The only issue that really comes up is when you have the larger game data files for assets and such. What you see in the game section is just a pointer to the files on the system, but there are individual files that exist like any OS does it.

Manually rebuilding does a few things. It gets rid of files that don't have any pointer, it will defrag files if necessary/possible, attaches "lost" files back to where they belong. It doesn't rewrite everything, nor does it defrag everything if it's already defragmented.

@4u2

Not all file system just randomly scatter bits all over the place. Depends on the OS and the file system being used. Even windows doesn't do this much anymore, although it will if it starts files in places where it can't write the whole file. The file system in the PS actually looks for the available space before writing, so unless you have a drive where you delete/install a lot of things regularly, or a very full hard drive, you shouldn't need to defrag.

@nitus

I don't think NTFS requires licensing fees. Kind of like DX, it's free to use and license. Might be wrong though. Developers don't have to worry about that aspect since they just use the OS's file system that exists.

I do know Sony doesn't though, because NTFS, even in it's improved current form, isn't as good as UFS for the purpose of a console, nor is NTFS as fast when file security is important, which it is on consoles. Not to say one is better than the other either way, because really, that's just for techie people to argue about like console fan boys argue over which is better, just that NTFS is good for servers and general access software, and UFS is better for things where file security coupled with speed is important.

[4U2NV]

@rainslacker

Cheers always nice to learn new info, my initial point was more hardware based than software in the fact the the magnetic hdds in ps4 still write and re write data by moving the actuator head over the platters regardless of file system because when the hdd is full it has to work harder therefore causing a slowdown..
Well thats what i was taught anyway 😡 lol

[KingLeil_33]

Since nobody is looking!!

One point: Orbis OS, which is BSD, is the PS4 Operating System. This is a cousin of Linux, and does not need to be defragmented because it is using either UFS or ZFS. Each filesystem is unaffected by fragmentation for the most part. The only situation in which fragmentation can become somewhat problematic for either filesystem is if your disk space is EXTREMELY full, like less than 1GB of storage remaining. Barring this, there should be no reason for thinking that there needs to be a "defrag" of your PS4 drive. So if you keep your disk drive under 90% capacity, you should be ok.

Sources: ExtremeTech on PS4 Orbis OS.
Sources: Google up information on ZFS, UFS, and fragmentation.

[danknassty]

Thanks for this.. however it would have been helpful to warn us that this *will* delete our *folders* if we had organized our games in that way. I have 100's of digital downloads, so I had my games organized into many folders based on genre. All completely lost, now my PS4 home screen is cluttered with all the individual games again.. have to rebuild all those custom folders.

[rainslacker]

This article is just some guy who thinks he has enough knowledge and assumed that what he did improved his system performance because he probably perceived a difference that wasn't actually there. Kind of like people who defrag their windows partition on their PC, and even though it's no faster than before, it feels good that they did it. It's a psychological thing.

Generally, I wouldn't follow the advice of any random writer on the internet. I'd want it to come from a reputable source who understands the ins and outs of what's going on, and can relay the pros and cons to the reader, or the system provider itself(in this case Sony).

It's rare that Sony will tell you to rebuild your databases to "fix" things. If you read their forums, they tend to have you try other things first. Even when it does it automatically after like say a power failure, it doesn't actually do anything if it doesn't find a problem, or only fixes a problem that arises. It doesn't rebuild the entire database like a manual rebuild does.

[danknassty]

I agree @rainslacker thanks for the response. I ended up sorting it out and everything is fine again.. it was just a huge headache and drove my OCD CRAZYYYY. :) I am very tech savvy and am usually not bothered by things like this, it was just that I have about 6 TB worth of data on my PS4 so it was a clusterf*** after I did this.

I definitely will be more cautious going forward. :D

[Phoenix76]

Only 1 beep if using a PS4 Pro model. Thats all i got when i just tried it

[UnHoly_One]

This is not something you should need to do on a console.

[Phoenix76]

Back in the day (PS2 GameCube era) it wasn't a issue as most data was store on your CD disks. Once hdd became standard hardware inside, (ps3 xb360) it became standard for consoles

[rainslacker]

This is actually something you shouldn't do manually unless instructed to do so by Sony, or it's a last resort trying to fix other problems. Sluggish OS's are generally just a perception thing with the PS. I doubt actual performance was increased with this, because the main OS screen to get to other things doesn't get changed enough to actually bog it down. It certainly wouldn't have an affect on apps or games since they run in their own hypervisor, so as long as the files involved aren't corrupted, it will run as it should. Typically performance problems there have nothing to do with fragmentation, and a simple uninstall/reinstall of the affected program will work fine.

[Bruh]

Rebuilding the database is essentially defragging the hard disk, its useful for situations when you're having issues, But its not something you should be doing every week. Once a month is good to keep files easier to access for the hard-disk and thus not causing slow downs with the OS

[KingLeil_33]

Again, not true at all, as the ZFS and UFS do not need to be defragmented. THESE ARE FACTS OF THE BSD OPERATING SYSTEM!!

[rainslacker]

It does other things. It repairs file pointers attached to the OS, restructures the file index to basically defrag that and remove bad pointers and update anything that is "defraged", and can reset certain parts of the system OS to "fix" problems that may not exist. It also does other things but they're kind of technical.

For the most part, there is no reason to do this with UFS. It is pretty efficient at putting files on the disk in sequential order. Pointers to non-existent files aren't a problem on a relatively small file index like you'd see in consoles where most files are actually packaged into bigger files. Resetting the OS to some degree actually causes unwanted outcomes....such as the user above who says it removes their organization of games into folders. Doing this on larger more diverse file systems like you'd see in a general purpose PC can be beneficial, but there is another function to handle this in FreeBDS/Linux

I wouldn't recommend doing this unless instructed to by Sony or a qualified repair technician, or as a last resort to fix other problems you may be having.

Sometimes the system will say it's rebuilding your database after a power failure or botched install, but that is a simpler form of the feature which only repairs the "broken" files that it thinks exists. It will analyze everything, and I believe it does remove pointers to non-existent files, but it doesn't actually defrag anything or reset the OS. That's why it goes pretty fast, and seems to skip over large sections in the progress meter.

Generally, if you're having a problem with a particular game or app, simply deleting it and reinstalling will fix it.

[Gamist2dot0]

My day 1 PS4 still works like it was new; came across a few errors with some games. I put it on rest mode a lot but like a PC, once in awhile I power it off completely when I'm away for a weekend, etc.

[nitus10]

If your hard disk is close to capacity you may find that you have disk performance (HDD) issues. A rule of thumb for hard disk drives is to try and restrict your data storage to about 85% of your HDD's capacity.

Usually, for home use, it is rare that you will need to defragment your hard disk although for enterprise systems defragmentation is only required when needed and there are plenty of tools that will give the System Administrator warnings that a defragmentation is required so appropriate change requests can be raised.

[joab777]

It's good to physically clean the PS4 once a month also.

[yomfweeee]

I can confirm you may have unexpected results. It redownload about half a dozen game updates. It reset all those "Discover" messages for me. Nothing time consuming though really.

[BillyBobT]

Rebuild every month. Buy a ton of games and download a lot of stuff. Never an issue. Worth doing.

[MagicBeanz]

Haven't experienced any of those issues.

[TheDreamCorridor]

I did this recently to my PS4 Pro, PS3, and PS Vita and everything actually does seem faster to me.