New
#220
Hi,
Thank you for this tutorial and the excellent answers. I read through all 22 pages of conversations in this thread (as well as many of those in the other tutorials about moving whole Profiles and having new Profiles stored in different locations) and somehow, I still have questions...not sure why my brain works like that.
I just bought a new HP - my first Windows 7 machine so I have a lot to learn. In the past, every time I've gotten a new machine, I've sworn to myself that I was "going to do things differently" and segregate my system files from my data files (docs, pics, etc) and never did it. But the first thing I did after getting this new machine (after loading AV and running windows updates) was to partition the 1TB HDD to (roughly) 250GB for the system and applications and 750TB for my data.
Anyway... it seems that many of this thread's questions and many of your replies revolve around HDD space issues and how if space is the concern then the best solution is not to move the user's folders but to create new ones on a separate drive and include them in libraries. But with this huge drive, it's not a space issue for me. It's a question of 4 things:
1. being able to quickly back up my system;Can you address the issue of the system image having to include the DATA drive if I relocate ANY of the user's folders (My Documents, My Pictures) to the DATA drive?
2. being able to quickly restore my sytem in event of a problem;
3. being able to easily back up my DATA without backing up a lot of extraneous application files which can be easily re-installed;
4. being able to easily reinstall Windows if it gets slow and clunky over time, without having to deal with my personal DATA at that time.
Right now, my 250GB SYSTEM partition's image file is 54GB. If I move about 1GB of personal data from the Documents folder (currently in the User Profile folder on the SYSTEM partition) to a folder on my 750GB DATA partition, are you saying that future backup images will include the DATA partition? Will the image include just that 1GB piece of the DATA drive or much more of it? While space for files, etc isn't an issue, keeping multiple copies of larger and larger system images will be.
I'm new to the practice of system images - they seem like a much better idea than just backing up files if the goal is to get up and running again quickly. BUT, over time, as one's Windows installation gets more and more cluttered, slow, and clunky, the system images will reflect that. So then doing a wipe and reinstalling Windows means losing all my User Profile info, right? Whereas if I had my User Profiles sitting on that DATA partition, I could wipe the SYSTEM partition and my User Profiles would still be intact. Do I have that right? Or is there a problem with my logic?
As a follow up question to that last one, IF you wipe and reinstall Windows from scratch, CAN you even use User Profiles that you saved from your prior system? If not, then is there even any reason to save them separately from the system (as they would be if they resided on a DATA drive)?
Thank you for your help.