Is partitioning a Hard Drive the best way to prevent data loss if computer crashes?

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Permalink Reply by David Silver on November 24, 2008 at 5:27pm

Yeah, use a second HD. An external one is nice for back up.

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Permalink Reply by Ian Walker on November 24, 2008 at 6:01pm

If you partition your hard drive and only have Windows and other software on the main partition then you only need to reinstall Windows if it fails (the other partitions contain your personal data).

If you used an external hard drive to install software onto then it can be much slower and you obviously need the drive plugged in at all times.

Take care.

Ian

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Permalink Reply by Shtanto on November 24, 2008 at 6:44pm

Look up eSATA. It's about as fast as internal drives, even to the point of being viable for gaming.

WIndows doesn't do too well moving in on a system with pre-existing installed programs. I tried it once with vista and boy howdy did things get screwey. At that time, I was fooling around with RAID.

Do not use RAID.

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Permalink Reply by Branhower on November 24, 2008 at 6:48pm

+1, I usually get headaches messing with RAID.

A second hard drive for backup is highly recommended by me.

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Permalink Reply by Mad Max on November 25, 2008 at 3:27am

eSATA is the same as the internal interface, it's just connected from the outside instead of fixed to the inside of the case. It's dependent on the controller more than anything but the same controler tends to handle both internal and external ports on most set ups.

RAID is awesome if you set it up properly. Having a 1+0 is the best solution as it'll share the drive cache and make a copy of everything to 2 drives at once automatically. Having another external drive to put back ups onto is also recommended but the chances of both drives in the RAID going kaput at the same time is pretty low unless it's related to a power surge or something, and seeing as both are connected to the same system at the same time you may get unlucky if all the systems in place to stop such a thing fail.

Another good way is to shove any really important files onto optical media, they're far far far less likely to become damaged or fail in the same way as a hard drive or flash based media. Write once discs are more reliable than re-writable ones but give you less versitility. Putting things like music and stuff on to a few DVD's or Blu-Ray (if you're rich and lucky enough to have a writer and lots of discs lol) is the safest way to back up, it serves as a hard copy. Professionals like designers and photographers and so on use this method as a means to have a reliable back up and to save space on their local discs.

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Permalink Reply by Aryeh Goretsky on November 25, 2008 at 12:23am

Hello,

The best way to prevent data loss if a computer crashes is to have the data backed up, preferably offsite and, if possible, offregion. This way, in the event of a catastrophic failure, you can reload your operating system and applications from the installation media and then restore the last backup of your data.

I create multiple partitions or disk volumes on computers I personally use, with each volume dedicated to a specific task (operating system, applications, application data files, downloaded software/patches/updates, multimedia, virtual machines, swap and so forth), however, that is more to allow me to synchronize files across multiple computers and reduce the time required for backups and restores than it is to prevent a system crash.

As McSimmons noted in his reply, backing up data locally but to different media improves your ability to recover from the loss of the primary storage medium.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

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Permalink Reply by The 64-bit geek on November 25, 2008 at 4:16am

If you partition a single drive and the drive crashes, you lose both partitions = no security.
Use a second physical drive and save your files and backups there.

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Permalink Reply by Petricia Daemon on November 25, 2008 at 5:12pm

OK, analogy time:

Let us imagine your 640GB 2.5" laptop hard drive as a train...

If you leave the drive in one partition, equalling 640GB you have one train car (or engine, whichever). As it careens down the tracks of daily life it may hit snags and bump and start. However, when it eventually derails, all is lost, the single car is FUBAR.

If you decide to partition your drive, say we turn your 640GB drive into 4 160GB partitions, you now have a train with 4 cars. It is possible that only certain cars will be affected by daily wear (typically your sector(s) accessed most often, SWAP file/PAGE File). If by chance your 4 car train derails, it is possible that one or two of the cars might be save-able, but this is typically NOT the case in a catastrophic drive failure/train derailment.


Now, let us take my system into account. My OS is loaded on a 40GB HDD (in 2 partitions, one Ubuntu, one XP) , I also have three 500GB drives, seperated (if I had time, money, and inclination I would probably mirror these in a RAID Array, more on that in a moment), each on their own channel.

The way my system works in the train analogy is multiple tracks, vice multiple trains. My high use access areas are on small easily replaceable disks, vice on any of my large storage disks. I also use the built in flash drive on my motherboard for my SWAP file, a very high usage area. Everything else is on its own drive depending on function or file type.

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Permalink Reply by Pappu_srkr on November 26, 2008 at 5:16am

I am new to this blog. However i agree with McSimmons. If your hard Drive fails the partitions will not help. All of the data might get lost. Its better according to my opinion to always backup the data to a different Hard Drive (an External Hard Drive), or any External Media.

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