Vista partition?

LOL, I guess HEP stands for Humble Experienced Professional
There are unrecoverable disasters, fullstop.
If it happens, as usually does, in the OS partition and the OS partition contains all of the data, then your data are gone. And the average user does not have a backup up to the last minute.

If the OS partition contains only the OS, then only your OS is gone. Yuor data sits still comfortably on another partition (under other OSes, you could even avoid to mount the partitions with the most important documents).

 

Anything that happens to my hard drive that I cannot recover from, partitioning would provide no assistance. Like a hardware failure. If the drive physically dies, you're right - I can't fix that. But partitions would have done nothing.

If a partition becomes unreadable, I can easily repair it or at the VERY LEAST recover the data from it.

 

Not for the irreparably damaged partition.

But the other partitions will remain unscathed (hence you won't lose time trying to recovery filepieces here and there).
That's what I mean by "not putting all the eggs in one basket".

 

If it's all on one hard drive, all of your eggs are in one basket. How often does one partition get damaged and become unreadable? Not often, but it happens. So if it does, I can pull all of my data off of that still. There are tools for repairing partitions and there are tools for pulling data off of partitions.

A "chkdsk /r x:" is almost always enough, and when it's not there are other solutions.

 

I dunno, I tend to agree with this guy that partitioning (or not) is a purely personal decision and ipso facto there cannot be an absolute "right" or "wrong" about it. That being said, the aforementioned guy does provide some discussion about why he favors partitioning his drives, the advantages list starts on this webpage. Interestingly, the first point he makes is that, since the first partition created takes the fastest/leading edge parts of the platters, creating a small partition initially to hold OS and applications will provide a noticeable improvement in performance on today's large drives. Take it for what it's worth, gents.

 

And so that makes YOUR backup regimen the only valid one in existence, right? For some of us we would rather have the OS backed up as a single image and the data backed up as individual files. And we have tools that we trust to do so, and have used these techniques in commercial environs for many years. (BTW I am the CTO for a company.)

The one and ONLY reason for organizing the hard drive into partitions, in my case is for ease of backup and restore. I only need to backup the OS/Programs partition on a very infrequent schedule (data is done nightly). I have the OS/Programs backup in a form that allows me to, within 18 minutes, completely recover my OS back to a known state. I don't have to waste any time trying to recover any data that was not yet backed up that happens to be on that partition. I, like you, have the tools and the knowledge to recover data from a single partition machine that has gone belly up. I have done it numerous times for friends, family and clients. I chose to use a backup methodology that insures I NEVER have to break out such tools on my own machine. My time is much too valuable for that. This method gives me the safety to play around with other software on my development machine knowing full well that if some piece of shareware or freeware I try out hoses my machine, I can COMPLETELY recover in 18 minutes with no data loss EVER.

Now suddenly just because YOU say so, we MUST throw this methodology out the window? I accept that you have a different view on this, more power too you. If your way allows you to recover within a time period acceptable to you from any sort of catastrophe, be it the entire drive being dead, the OS going bad, or losing a single data file, GREAT! But am really confused why you seem to think yours is the only correct way. And further if you can show me how on a laptop, while at a clients site hundreds of miles from my office, I can reset my OS/Programs to a known state in 18 minutes without losing any data, I am more than willing to consider a new methodology. (And before you ask, YES I have had the need arise for this in the past. Twice to be exact. And that is enough for me to consider this as a real need when mapping out a backup recovery scheme.) I owe it to my clients to be prepared to recover from any sort of eventuality as quickly as I know how. And this is the quickest method I know of, but am willing to entertain other ways.

Gary

 

I've never bought into the whole "partitoning makes the machine faster" mindset. Just as I don't buy into the "it makes it slower" one either. The tests I did last night and today on both an XP and Vista machines certainly seem to dispel the second one. Although I do believe that daveperman is seeing some degradation. But I am at a loss to understand WHY, in light of my own tests.

For me, as I said (at length) in my message above this one, the ONLY reason I have used partitions is for ease of backup and recovery, period.

Gary

 

Stopped reading right here. I said a few pages back:

Hmm, seems I was saying here that it's just a personal preference. jackluo923 showed the little benefit you get from not partitioning, you showed the little benefit from partitioning. Again, it's personal preference which is more valuable.
But DON'T tell me it's for data security when it is not going to help data security in the least.

What makes me mad is that you treat me like I am telling you your way is wrong, and really all I did was tell Sredni Vashtar that it does not make his data more secure - which I think even you agree with.

 

I knew you were a capitalist pig!

I have 2 drives in my notebook, and I have them set up like this -

With SP2 for Windows Vista coming out soon, I'll be re-installing the OS, and I have decided to quit my decade long ritual of installing programs on a different partition that the one on which the OS is installed. What would be the best setup for my drives to get the most out of them, performance wise (inb4 no partitions kthx)?

 

To be honest I don't think there is ANY benefit performance wise to having multiple partitions. I've seen the argument that having the OS partition first gives it faster access, blah, blah, blah. But the effect is MINISCULE.

To me the only benefit is one of organization for the purpose of backup and restoration. So thinking through a good backup scenario that allows you to QUICKLY recover from either a dead drive, a dead OS or a single dead file is what you should use to dictate the partition scheme.

If you use Acronis to make images, then a single partiton, might make sense as HEP points out Acronis allows for single file recovery. The only downside is if you MUST recover an entire partition, you MIGHT have to loose data files that are not on your most recent image.

I don't like Acronis, no wait I don't USE Acronis, because it takes twice as long to image a partition than my ancient copy of Ghost (Ghost 2003). I actually like the Acronis interface a lot. So, I can't do single file recovery, therefore my scheme is a bit different.

The bottom line is figure out how you would quickly recover from

1. A dead drive.
2. A dead OS.
3. A dead file.

And let the answer to that dictate how you partition.

My captialist pig headed $.02.

Gary

 

Double post. heh.

 

Gone now. thanks for the "heads up".

Gary

 

I don't back-up my OS/programs. I just back-up my data (movies/setups/docs etc) to an external drive, manually (copypasta), about once a month. I have to have at least 2 partitions in case I have to format and re-install my OS.

 

You should look into using a program like Microsoft's SyncToy (free) which can do incremental backups and has backup profile options, or at the very least ycopy which will not halt on copy errors/overwrite questions.

 

Will SyncToy replace the file in this scenario -

Let's say I have a FLAC audio file on both, my notebook, and my external drive. I edit the ID3 tag of the file on my notebook (let's say I change the artist tag from LimpBizkit to Limp Bizkit), the name remains the same. Will it replace the file present on my external drive with the file on my notebook (which has the same name, but a different tag) when I run it?

 

+1 on SyncToy (but that link was dead here is the new one SyncToy 2.0

Never heard of the other one. HEP how does it handle the file overwrite question, does it use the date and time stamps when dups are found?

Gary

 

Nah, ycopy is a "quick n dirty" little tool I use for copying mass amounts of data when I know nothing of value will be overwritten or missed.
It just copies everything from one location to another, automatically overwrites, ignores locked & in use files.

 

Thanks, but the fact that it just logs errors rather than stopping at the first one, makes it a useful little tool to have in the arsenal. Plus I see my buddy, Jake wrote the review of it.

Gary

 

Another nice little thing is that it comes as an installer package, but all it really does is install shortcuts and make a program files directory. The program is actually a standalone .exe so you can put it on a flash drive and such and run it without a problem.

 

You Agent Smiths're spread all over the world!

And answer this please, Mr. Smarty Pants -

 

And if you aren't careful those agents will be knocking at your front door real soon.

As for SyncToy I can't say for certain as I don't use it myself. (I gave it a +1, because I have acquaintances (agents) who do.) But I do think it would, as long as the tool you use to update the tag also updates the date and time stamp of the FLAC file.

Sure would be easy enough to test. Try it out. I am willing to bet you a beer it works for ya.

Gary

BTW I use SureSync for this sort of thing. It cost me $60 bucks several years ago but was the best $60 I ever spent on a piece of software. It is one of the few sync tools that does, as one option, what is called "multi-mirror" this is where you tell SureSync you have a directory on two machines and any changes, additions and deletions, made on one machine are to be duplicated on the other. (The deletion bit trips up most sync apps. Almost all of them assume that a file missing on one machine, means it should be copied from the other. SureSync keeps a database of the contents of both machines and uses that to see that the file used to exist on both now is missing from one and should therfore be deleted from the other.)

 

Yes, the date and time stamps on the FLAC file are also updated (you mean the "Date Modified" bit, right?). I've downloaded it, and I'll try it out in a bit.

BTW I have Sync Center installed on my notebook (comes with Windows Vista). Won't it do the same thing?

 

Yes, it would replace the file on your external hard drive when you ran the backup. It would consider it a file update.