"pjp" wrote

| I've never really understood why people make multipule paritions on
| single physical hard disks.

I do it for several reason. Multi-booting. Organization.
Redundancy. Security/integrity.

Organization: I have basic storage partitions for big
stuff, another for media -- photos, graphics, videos.
I have one that's relatively small and has copies of all
frequently backep up files. So I can just copy
that partition to a DVD when I want to do a backup.
I use 2 disks that are mostly redundant, in case one
dies suddenly. And I have a row of shortcuts along the
top of the desktop, one for each partition. So it's
easy to just drop currnt work into multiple partitions
for temporary backup.

Multi-booting: I used to experiment with Linux and
in the 9x days I'd have several OSs multibooting
for testing software. These days I don't do that
so much, but I still like the idea of small OS
partitions up front.

Security: If something goes wrong with Windows
I'm not risking everything else on the disk. If C
suddenly goes bad and I have to reinstall a disk image
that doesn't affect the data.
I think of it like a tractor trailer. The OS and software
are the tractor. They only need a few GBs. And the
tractor is fundamentally different from the trailer. One
is a motor, the other just storage. The motor is far
more at risk for corruption, system failure, malware, etc.
The data partitions are the trailer. A corrupt system file
won't hurt those.

To me it's absurd to waste 100s of GBs empty space,
or at-risk space, to put a 10-60 GB OS on a 1 TB hard disk.
Disks are so big now there just isn't any reason to have an
OS on so much space. It's like having a single truck the
size of 20 trucks. Then if you break down in the desert
with perishable cargo, you lose everything. There's no need
to take such a risk. With disk image backup I can have a
new tractor (OS disk image) hooked up within an hour and
be on my way. (I've never actually had a hard disk die.
I have been in situations where a system became unbootable
and I couldn't save it.)

Once you start using that approach, it makes sense to keep
the disk images as small as possible. These days a lot of people
think they're doing disk image backup when what they're really
doing is to store a constantly-updated copy of Windows
along with all data. That's clunky, wasteful and insecure.
You can't store a copy on DVDs, so typically it's going to
be stored on a connectd disk. A disk that will be fried along
with the main disk in the event of a power surge.

You disk image shouldn't need to be updated. Disk image
backup is not about restoring the whole tractor trailer. It's
only necessary to restore the motor/tractor/OS.

I guess if you've got money to burn buying 10+ hard
disks then you can afford to waste a few TBs.

I don't actually have a lot of data. My first disk is
a 256 MB SSD. The second is 500 GB. I still have lots of
space on both.

| I think they think it's so if something goes bad the "other" partitions
| are ok. I've instead found if a parition is bad then the disk is also
| bad

Only if the problem is the hardware. If you have a
fatal OS problem then C drive may be kaput, but that
has no effect on data partitions.