Solomon and Stiffler constructed infinitely many families of linear codes meeting the Griesmer bound in 1965. It is well-known in 1990's that certain Griesmer codes (codes with the zero Griesmer defect) are equivalent to Solomon-Stiffler codes or Belov codes. Griesmer codes constructed in some recent papers published in IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory are actually Solomon-Stiffler codes or affine Solomon-Stiffler codes proposed in our previous paper. Therefore it is more challenging to construct optimal codes with positive Griesmer defects. In this paper, we construct several infinite families of optimal codes with positive Griesmer defects. Then these codes are certainly not equivalent to Solomon-Stiffler codes or Belov codes. Weight distributions and subcode support weight distributions of these optimal codes are determined. On the other hand, some of constructed optimal linear codes are optimal locally recoverable codes (LRCs) meeting the Cadambe-Mazumdar (CM) bound. Some of our constructed optimal codes are very close to the CM bound. Localities of these optimal or almost optimal LRC codes are two.