topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Thursday March 28, 2024, 7:06 am
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Last post Author Topic: Partitioning hard drive - any point?  (Read 18924 times)

longrun

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 155
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Partitioning hard drive - any point?
« Reply #25 on: March 17, 2006, 08:33 PM »
I also use the Acronis TrueImage/Genie Backup routine and have partitions for OS, programs, data, and temp/swapfile, but I'm not sure I'd do it again. One thing you should be aware of if you're considering this is that many applications store valuable data in the Application Data folder under the OS, and other programs store data in unexpected places, so your "data" backup may not include everything you'd like.

Carol Haynes

  • Waffles for England (patent pending)
  • Global Moderator
  • Joined in 2005
  • *****
  • Posts: 8,066
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Partitioning hard drive - any point?
« Reply #26 on: March 18, 2006, 05:31 AM »
One of the nice things about Genie is that it is possible to write scripts to ensure all the registry settings and extra files etc. are all backed up for applications.

You can use something like Total Uninstall to monitor the registry and file changes that happen when a program is used to help write the script.

f0dder

  • Charter Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 9,153
  • [Well, THAT escalated quickly!]
    • View Profile
    • f0dder's place
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: Partitioning hard drive - any point?
« Reply #27 on: March 18, 2006, 12:32 PM »
Repeat after me:


RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!


mirroring is great, and I wouldn't be without it. But it's only useful to guard against data loss in case of harddrive crash - it doesn't save you from errant deletes, viruses, filesystem crashes et cetera.

Multiple partitions is a good thing, since you only lose one partition in case of filesystem corruption. Granted, filesystem corruption doesn't happen often if you run NTFS, but it CAN happen, and when it does it usually hits you hard. VERY hard.

A separate partition for your paging file is nonsense. It only helps if you put it on a separate physical drive. Besides, you should have enough RAM that you don't need a paging file (which is, of course, impossible if you use anything from Adobe ;-) )

I have a partition for OS + apps, one for documents and source code, one for games and then a "dump" partition. When I get the time to back up stuff etc., I'll merge games and "dump" since there's not much point in having them separate. "dump" is where I have temp files, downloads, misc. large data files et cetera.
- carpe noctem

Rover

  • Master of Smilies
  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 632
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Partitioning hard drive - any point?
« Reply #28 on: March 18, 2006, 03:10 PM »
f0dder, you're right.  This is the difference between availability and recoverability.

Availablility - My data is usable right now.  RAID 1,3,5 & 10 all do things to make your data less likely to be lost due to a single drive failiure.  Other solutions allow for multiple drive failes (at the cost of less usable disk).

Recoverability -  My data is not available now (due to some failure) but I can replace (reformat) the failed equipment and RESTORE my data from my last backup.  There are 1.21x10^8 power ways to backup your stuff.  Some will even do continuous backups so that your "last backup" may be only seconds before your system failed.

Backups are also good for keeping various versions of configurations, so you can recover system settings to a point in time.

Availability (redudant sytems & RAID) and Recoverability (backups) are different animals with different purposes.
so:

RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
Insert Brilliant Sig line here
« Last Edit: March 18, 2006, 03:14 PM by Rover »

f0dder

  • Charter Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 9,153
  • [Well, THAT escalated quickly!]
    • View Profile
    • f0dder's place
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: Partitioning hard drive - any point?
« Reply #29 on: March 18, 2006, 04:46 PM »
I hope to play with RAID-5 in the future... sounds like a good balance between wasted space and redundancy. I'll probably wait until I can afford some dedicated controller for it though, instead of a software solution.

As for backups, I don't currently have anything really good. I use subversion for my source code though, so at least that is relatively safe. Using TrueImage at work for backups, but it's not really ideal for that. Kicks ass for drive imaging, though :)
- carpe noctem