Partitioning & Backup Strategy

Someone asked me just yesterday, what the best statergy on Backup was, and I helped with a little advice, So I've also decided to post my Strategy here also just in case it may help others wondering the same:

This is based on using a 1TB Hard Drive ( in my Case WD Caviar Green 64MB Cache)

Since it's highly unlikely that your Operating system alone is going to occupy more that 40GB with all updates etc and programs then 120GB should suffice for this portion of the drive. This leaves 611GB still free remaining, as windows reads 1TB as 931GB only. Therfore splitting the 611 into half (e.g 420GB and 390GB leaves space for DATA & BACKUP. Also the read write on the OS partition will be significantly faster ( In my case for this drive 300MBS as theres less space in which to read it. So in my case I have a 1TB devided in 3 partitions 120/ 420/ 390, and of course 100MB reserved area.

A Few people have thought that partioning their hard drive will save them from dissaster, and things wont go wrong, for those that don't know, partioning a hard drive only places sectors of the disk in seperate locations on the actual drive, it does NOT! split the drive into 3 seperate pieces, (which one person acctually believed) so, Having a second hard drive installed as a reserve, or an external hard drive is also good, as you can create a second backup on this drive should the main drive fail.

Another way of viewing partioning is to think of your hard drive as your house, and each partition represents a room in your house.

Having huge space for an OS drive alone is wasted, as you may have noticed SSD drives are now usually only 60/120/240 GB in size for that reason alone. A friend of mine refuses to use an SSD for that only reason, because quote: "He wants the space" for what i have no idea, unless he's going to fill it with 950GB worth of mp3 or movies, but anyway thats my Partioning and backup strategy.

 

Excellent thread and very good advice. I will further advise to get rid of the 100MB System Reserved partition. It will also free up one of the four allowed primary partitions.

The 100MB System Reserved partition is only good for BitLocker.

Best regards,

KOR!

 

Also see What's your backup strategy these days?

I have one internal drive. I use two main partitions - one for OS+programs, and one for data. Backups are stored on the data partition. Macrium Reflect Free images the OS+programs partition. Areca Backup (free) is used for file-based backup of some folders on the data partition. SpiderOak free account is used to backup files within Documents folder (on data partition) online. FreeFileSync is used to sync backups (from both Macrium Reflect and Areca Backup) to an external USB drive. Macrium Reflect and Areca Backup backups are periodically burned to DVD. 7-Zip is used to create DVD-sized file chunks of existing Areca Backup backups for later DVD burning. I use Macrium Reflect's option to split files into 4.37 GB chunks for later DVD burning purposes. Burning is done with ImgBurn.

 

No partitioning on my machines (notebooks). Only cold images mainly with ShadowProtect to 3 external USB hard drives, generally on a monthly basis or before windows updates. Data is copied and synchronized with Karen's Replicator, I also use flash drives to store data (once a year I copy very important data to DVD).

 

I do the opposite, I usually create images after updating with Windows Update. This is because I have had many problems with Windows Update not working, and I want to have images in which I know WU worked.

 

Same here Robin...although I don't use it, it's a good example of how something like snapshot applications are helpful...like RollBack RX.

 

I do monthly Full Image of the Windows XP Pro System Partition to:

1. File which is stored on another partition of the internal hard drive containing the Windows XP Pro System Paritition and to multiple internal SATA backup hard drives.

2. DVD+R DL

I do a weekly Differential Image of the Windows XP Pro System Partition to File which is stored on another partition of the hard drive containing the Windows XP Pro System Paritition and to multiple internal SATA hard drives.

I periodically backup all of the Image files to a 2 TB USB 2.0 hard drive which remains turned off when not in use.

I routinely backup (Syncback Free) any files which I consider to be important to both multiple internal SATA hard drives and to a network RAID1 Server. I leave the RAID1 Server turned off when not in use.