SD,
Thanks for your comments - love your reference to excremental! But won't follow that line of thought here ...
I follow your reasoning on putting XP into a separate partition - my reservation being that some programmes, by default, place their data files into a folder they create in the "Program Files" folder - which should (I guess) live in the same partition as the operating system. My concern is that if the operating system lives in its own partition, users may not bother to back it up (on the basis that they can easily re-install the operating system) and they may lose data and/or setting if they need to do a clean install.
Actually, for that matter, strictly speaking one should save the entire "Documents and Settings" folder (which contains the "My Documents" folder) onto the memory sticks because important data is saved outside the "My Documents" folder. But that's twice the size, so I don't bother.
One point I did forget to make is beware the false sense of security and well-being from deploying mirrored RAID drives: this only saves your bacon in the case of a catastrophic failure of one drive (a rare occurence). Since data is simultaneously written to both drives, it does
not protect you from malware or corrupt files.
The ready availability of inexpensive large drives, and users' ability and willingness to install them (sometimes to the dismay of the power supply) does give cause for concern when said ability does not extend to working out how to back them up. Case in point: son and heir (who has about 2 terabytes of storage installed on his system) recently lost a 750Mb drive which contained just about the entire Feline inventory of movies ... Needless to say - they were not backed up ...
