Maybe this is a dumb question...

[SilkTurtle]

But it comes from someone with very little experience. I read some of these posts that mention using a partition for backups.... I thought if the HD crashed, the whole thing would be useless? Isn't it a better idea to backup the important stuff onto a 2nd physical drive?

 

[Ionizer86]

Sorry, looks like I made the statement. Of course, it's better to get a physical drive to backup upon. Better yet is backing up to a HDD in another location, since natural disasters can take out both HDDs simultaneously.

What I meant was that if me or some dude deletes files on one partition, I'll still have the file on the other partition, since I tend to use shift + delete instead of simply delete sometimes, and I don't want to cause myself any regret.

 

[benchmarq]

You are correct about the fact that a physically crashed hard drive would make it very difficult to recover any essential data, no matter how many partitions it's split into. The main reasons people prefer to use a separate partition for the OS are faster access and defragmenting times, and so you won't lose everything such as downloaded files, programs, or documents you've created if... or should I say when Windows gets screwed up to the point that you will want to perform a fresh install. Overall, a second physical hard drive may be a better place to store your important data, but if you are concerned about the frustration involved when a hard drive crashes, it's tough to beat the benefits of backing up to CD-R or CD-RW's

 

[CocaCola5]

Though its definitely a good idea to backup on cdrw, sometimes though it not very practical to burn 10 cdr in succession. For this, its better to have two(or more) drives each with a sizeable(say 10G) [backup] partition, and do redundant type backups of each hard drive.

 

[GreenLantern]

a backup drive is safer and easier than burning to cd's.
I have an old 3.5 GB that servers this role awesomely. That's plenty of room for my files (and install files!). With this it is not disaster if I even accidentally reformatted my 'prod' drive.

 

[HouRman]

Ive had partitions leading to the letter M (For win98 you have to change a setting to allow the letters to reach that far).

Then by accident I deleted a partition I regreted... It's so easy to format an extra partition.. just right click, format, start, yes... bam it's gone and there's no canceling it.

I suggest labeling your partitions like (games, windows, work, computer, sha1red, or TOP SECRET)

It's common to see motherboards that support RAID (Redundant aray independent discs). Raid can be setup for 2 drives so that one is a copy of the other. This way there's less work involved with burning backup CDs, or copying files through different hard drives.