partitioning to allow easy backups
Jun 05 '00
This is a setup I use so I can easily make backups that I can restore from in the case of a Windows failure. I used to have to reformat and reinstall windows about every 6 to 12 months due to windows errors or other system file errors. This is primarily for people who use only one operating system or multiple that can share a partition.
If you have only one hard drive, I would recommend partitioning it into two parts. One that is dedicated for your operating system and one for everything else. This is really only useful if your hard drive is 4GB or larger. If you are running Windows 95 or Windows 98, I would make the partition between 800MB and 1GB. This should be plenty of space for windows. The default install should use about ~350MB which leaves you plenty of space to grow. Then leave all your remaining space for a second partition. If you have more hard drives, I would just make them all one big partition. Just remember to install everything to D drive now. Oh, you may also want to place your swap file on D drive (Right click on My Computer, select Properties, click on the Performance tab, click the Virtual Memory button, then set your swap file to d drive) to give more room for your OS.
Now, how does this help you make backups? Well, what I do once a week is make an image of my c drive using Norton Ghost (~50$) (other backup programs should work too) and save it to d drive. If you have a CD burner, you can also write it out to a CD-RW disk, make the disc bootable and copy over any software needed to extract the image back to c drive. Norton Ghost allows compression of images so you could fit ~1.2GB partition onto a CD. Now that you have a backup of c drive, if anything ever goes wrong (such as windows doesn't boot anymore), all you have to do is restore c drive from the image and at most you lose a weeks worth of information. That's a lot better than having to lose everything.
I started to do this because I noticed that most major problems are due to problems with Windows, not hardware or other software. Most other problems can be fixed pretty painlessly, but when Windows doesn't boot, there's not much else you can do. I currently run Windows 98 and Windows 2000 on c drive which is 1.3GB. They currently use a total of 1GB and the compressed image is only about 500MB. I've had to restore from an image a few times and am thankful every time that I do that I have the backups available.
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