Re: How to make a new partition?

Shenan Stanley wrote:

Chuck Davis wrote:
For the life of me, I don't know the perceived advantages of
partioning the drive. I've read a lot of "reasons," but none made
it throught my thick skull. In those computers that arrive from the
manufacturer with the OS in a partition, I have found that that
partition will eventually be too small and cause problems.

The *only* technical advantage that is hard to argue with is if you
want to store your DATA - nothing else - on the second partition.
The advantage? If you *have* to reinstall the OS and you know what
you are doing - at least your data stays intact - given the reason
for the whole mess is non-hardware related and whatever software
issue that caused your reinstall did not include deleting files from
other drives. *grin*



Sorry to disagree, but I'll throw in a contrary opinion here, if I may:

I don't think that's a good reason for separating data on a separate
partition at all. To me, if your data is important to you, it always needs
to be backed up, and if it is backed up and you ever have to reinstall the
operating system, you simply restore the data from the backup, even if it's
not on a separate partition. In fact, I think that many people who do as you
suggest get a false sense of security from it and have that kind of
separation *instead* of a backup, thinking that it takes away the need for
a backup. In fact, that's not at all true of course, since things like a
hard drive crash (and other events) can easily destroy everything.

To me the best reason for keeping your data on a partition separate from the
operating system system is to facilitate data backup. If you back up only
data, rather than image the entire drive, with most backup programs, it's
easier to do it if the data is on a separate partition.

--
Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
Please reply to the newsgroup


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