Partitioning Your Drive – How do you feel?

I've never partitioned and I've been working with PC's that have hard drives since DOS 2. I currently have a 1TB drive for Windows 7. I have a second internal 750GB drive that I do full hard drive backups with Acronis True Image software.

Old, slow computers, required a lot of time just to defrag a 10GB hard drive. That is not the case any longer, and the OS could care less where the data is - it just knows it's on the hard drive.

Like someone else mentioned, if the hard drive crashed everything is lost, if it's not backed up somewhere else.

These questions always make me laugh a little when I see the never option. You have to partition a drive, or else it won't be usable.

Anyway, it depends for me. if it is a single drive system, like my laptop, I alway cut off a D drive for storage. I don't ever both with redirection...I just store things on the D drive. On a tower that has two drives, which is preferable...I don't. I use the smallest for the OS and the largest for data. For example, in my current home system, i have identical WD drives, except one is 320 GB and one is 640 GB. The 320 GB is C and the other is D.

I have found that having 2 hard drives of approximately same size with each divided into two partitions is the best way to go because....

Drive 1 will have the OS in a 32gb partition that is more than enough for almost all programs that one may use even with 64bit OS (this does not apply if you install large games), including Microsoft Office.

The rest of the drive holds data partition that should have an user section and folder for all masters of programs that you install. The drive should be large enough to hold even the OS image and any other images of CD/DVD masters, just in case you loose them. Also images of the running OS should be stored here for quick OS restore.

Drive 2 will be a duplicate of drive 1. This is is important for situation where drive 1 goes bad. Even the OS should be here and in running condition in the partition 1.

Sync program should be used to sync the two drives very frequently to keep it updated just in case.


Even with 2 drives, a additional offline backup should be made of both the OS and the data partitions of drive 1.

Atin90 said:

Drive 2 will be a duplicate of drive 1. This is is important for situation where drive 1 goes bad. Even the OS should be here and in running condition in the partition 1.

Sync program should be used to sync the two drives very frequently to keep it updated just in case.

Except that doesn't work, because the boot sector isn't copied across, and you are at the mercy of the sync program. There are also several flaws with that system as well, such as a malware infection could grab both drives and infect them. The key to remember is that a backup is never kept "live" with the system. It seems common around here, unfortunately, but you're over thining and over-complicating your recovery.

If you really want to keep that Drive 1 safe, use an external drive of a size large enough to hold a drive image of Drive 1, and set it to backup on a schedule. I have two physical drives in my system. The primary is for the OS and apps, while the second is for my user data. I keep an image, done weekly of the primary, and keep everything on my D drive also copied over to my server. I have options for restoration, and neither backup option is kept on my computer. That's the key.

DeaconFrost,

I do understand that the boot sector is not copied using a simple sync program and besides, that would not realy work anyway. A imaging program is needed and most of imaging programs have some capabilities of copying the boot MBR. True Image is one that I use and it works just fine for the MBR.