Ken Blake wrote:
On Tue, 28 Aug 2018 11:56:09 -0600, "Bill in Co"
wrote:

Ken Blake wrote:
On Tue, 28 Aug 2018 05:27:55 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:


Agreed: AFAIAC, most prog.s become part of the OS, in effect. (At one
point I could see the advantage of OS on C, progs on another, and data
on a third, and admired people disciplined enough to do that; but now,
since I consider prog.s - and their configuration - to be part of the
"system" I want to be able to restore after any disaster, I'd see that
as an unnecessary extra complication.)



Yes, but It's not just a matter of what you consider. Since almost all
programs have components within Windows, in the registry and
elsewhere, keeping them on a separate drive or partition is useless.
If you lose Windows, you lose the programs too. If you reinstall
Windows, you have to reinstall the programs too, so the benefit that
many people imagine of having them on a separate drive or partition
doesn't exist.


I think many people overpartition because they use partitions as an
organizational structure. They have a strong sense of order and want
to separate apples from oranges on their drives.

Yes, separating different kinds of files on partitions is an
organizational technique, but so is separating different kinds of
files in folders. The difference is that partitions are static and
fixed in size, while folders are dynamic, changing size automatically
as necessary to meet your changing needs. That generally makes folders
a much better way to organize, in my view.

True, partitions can be resized when necessary, but except for newer
versions of Windows, doing so requires third-party software (and the
ability to do it in Windows is primitive, compared to the third-party
solutions). Such third-party software normally costs money, and, no
matter how good and how stable it is, affects the entire drive,
entailing a risk of losing everything. Plan your partitions well in
the first place, and no repartitioning should be necessary. The need
to repartition usually comes about as a result of overpartitioning in
the first place.

What frequently happens when people organize with partitions instead
of folders is that they miscalculate how much room they need on each
such partition, and then when they run out of room on the partition
where a file logically belongs, while still having lots of space left
on the other, they simply store the file in the "wrong" partition.
Paradoxically, therefore, that kind of partition structure results in
less organization rather than more.

I think this is a good philosophy too, with a couple of caveats:


Sorry, but I disagree with your caveats. See below.


You at least should have a second partition (or preferably a second
drive) to store image backups of your system. A second partition is
especially handy for a laptop, which may have only one hard drive. I'd
call this a minimalist approach, as using another drive would be more
ideal, but it sure has come in handy for me in the case of my laptop
experiments.


I strongly disagree. A second drive is a very bad choice for backups
and a second partition is even worse.

Doing that leaves you susceptible to simultaneous loss of the original
and backup to many of the most common dangers: severe power glitches,
nearby lightning strikes, virus attacks, even theft of the computer
(and especially with a laptop, if you travel with it, theft of the
computer is almost always a real possibility).

In my view, secure backup needs to be on removable media, and not kept
in the computer. For really secure backup (needed, for example, if the
life of your business depends on your data) you should have multiple
generations of backup, and at least one of those generations should be
stored off-site.


Second, if you have stuff that takes an enormous amount of disk space,
like a large collection of audio or video files, it might make more
sense to have a separate partition for those, since you may not need to
back those up as frequently. This approach keeps the system drive
backup images much more reasonably sized and quick to restore.



Yes, I agree. Your partitioning scheme should generally be based on
your backup scheme.


To me the most critical thing to protect is the system, especially if you
like experimenting with it, like I seem to do.


Again, I strongly disagree, although I grant you that not everybody is
the same. For the great majority of people, the most important thing
to protect is data (including photos, videos, etc.). It make take
considerable effort, but you can always recreate the system if need
be. You generally can *not* recreate most data, especially photos and
videos.

When I said a second drive above, that includes the option of using an
external hard disk drive enclosure (preferably eSATA), and didn't
necessarily mean a second internal drive. Granted, an external drive is
more ideal than a second internal one.

As for data backups, I just assumed you keep a backup of your personal data,
and was really trying to stress the importance of the system backup
(especially since I've been doing all these experiments on this Win7
laptop!). (Maybe I assume too many things. :-) I've just seen how often
in here or elsewhere people "lose" their system and need help, and don't
even have a image or clone backup of their system. But in my case, if I
lost the C: partition, and the collection of programs I have on it (in the
order of several hundred, dating back to antiquity!), it would be almost
impossible to recreate it from scratch.