In article ,
says...

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

I backup the system as an image. Seeing as system itself changes little
regarding installed apps etc. I'm not overly zeolous about it, e.g. last
image can easily be couple months ago. I've only had occassion to
restore an image once. It went as it should.

I have multipule external hard disks I use to make second copies of
everything I value, e.g. videos, photos, music ettc. etc. I also burn
copies of everything to dvd and keeo stored safely and yet never used
.... so far Videos may or may not also be converted to a standard dvd,
deepends on the video. At any given time I usually have three copies
(never less than two) of everything of value.