J. P.

You're going up; I want to go down.

I don't think so. I'm just building upon what they already know to larger
stuff. Working my way down from a building to a filing cabinet and its
contents won't go down that well (of you pardon me the pun here :-) ).

make folders within folders within folders ad infinitum

Personally I think you're making a mistake there (which will probably bite
you in the behind at some time): there *is* a limit to how many folders you
can make, and this limit is influenced by the contents of each folder.

Which, using my earlier suggested cardbord boxes analogy, is easy to explain
and understand: there are only so many boxes you can place in a van. Even
when you buy a bigger van - or even a transport truck (or cargo ship!) -
you're still going to get full at some point ...

But I think I know where your "ad infinitum" comes from. Thats, as I
mentioned, why I suggested the cardboard boxes-within-boxes-within-boxes
approach.

but instead because I don't want anything which scrambles the OS partition
to (have _too_ much chance to) scramble the data one.

I'm not so worried about that scrambling (though it happened to me once,
using a cheap drive bay). I'm more worried about an easy restore process
being sabotaged because of the datafiles (on that same partition) that would
get lost by it (as mentioned, for the OS partition I always assume a full
partition backup/restore).

I _image_ my OS-and-software partition ... but just _sync_ my data
partition

Same here. The OS is a clusterf*uck of interconnected files, and being able
to restore them one-by-one makes little sense (could well make the problem
larger instead of smaller). The datafiles on the other hand ...

See above: if something kills your OS, your data is _probably_ still safe

I'm sorry, but I don't see a difference between a single, multi-partition
setup, or a multi-drive one here. I also would not be too sure about
anything accidentally killing the OS (on its own drive) not as easily have
damaged (some of) the data (on another drive).

And in the case of *targetted* fauling up I would even say that the data is
much more interresting than the OS: If the backups are affected too the OS
can always be reinstalled. The data ? Well ...

In other words, my OS-seperate-from-the-data approach is because of the
difference in backup and retrieval methods, nothing more.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser