Originally Posted by
Feline
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.
The short answer to that is: don't let that happen. Put your data in the right place, under your "Profile", and back that up. I'm strongly against backing up the OS, because you may be backing up, then restoring, the problem that brings the system down. I always separate OS from data. I have two computers (desktop and netbook), and replicate my data between them, so a need to reinstall the OS on one is not a disaster.
(When I say "Profile", I mean the location where all your individual data is stored, the contents of the %userprofile%" environment variable. "My Documents" is under there. If you use Mac or Linux, this is your "home directory".)
Originally Posted by
Feline
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.
The problem there is that some applications are ill-behaved, or not "up to speed" on the way it should be done. Older games stored their "save files" under the program directory, but newer ones (e.g. MS FSX, Civ4) put these under "My Documents" as they should. One that keeps coming up in discussions is Microsoft Outlook: if you just let it do its thing, it stores all your mail in a file in a
hidden directory, something like %userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook. Again, in the past, I moved that file to "My Documents", so I knew where it was and that it was getting backed up.
In general, my message is "know where your data is, and back it up. If it's in the wrong place, move it, or make copies in the right place."