at016 said:
I'm posting this new thread for all of you to let me know
your opinion about which storage scheme (in a generic
way, independent of the O.S.) works better for you.
I dont think it can be independant of the OS, the OS
has quite a bit of an effect on what works best.
I think its got some real advantages to have a separate
OS and applications partition if you are prepared to image
or incrementally image that partition before installing or
updating or reconfiguring anything much, and that needs
somewhere to write that image if you only have one drive.
Less important with XP whose restore points will save
your bacon quite a bit of the time, but not always.
You usually need more than one OS partition
if you use more than one OS. Few do that tho.
I think it makes most sense to have a single partition
for everything else, mostly because its not easy to
decide what size separate partitions should be and
its dangerous to change the partition sizes later if
you arent fully backed up.
And free space gets scattered over the partitions.
While in theory thats less of a problem than it used
to be, in some ways its worse with modern digital
TV done on the PC instead of VCRs etc.
And the organisation depends on what tools you have too.
Many have been using very crude imaging for backup. Thats
less necessary now with decent modern incremental imagers
and the best of them has file level backup as well.
E.G. This guy in Flickr prefers this kind of organization for his files:
Stupid approach having that many specific partitions.
Those should be folder trees with that basic structure
at the top level of the folder trees.
But I can't figure out how things are organized
down the file tree structure in each of his partitions!
And thats a whole nother can of worms.
I do attempt to organise his partions logically, but
thats a lot of work and it can make more sense to
not bother with too much structure and search instead.
That there is no one simple one size fits all that is best for all
situations.
