[X Newbies] Partitioning Drive?

[Florin Alexander Neumann]

On Monday, May 19, 2003, at 17:15 Canada/Eastern, Michael Winter wrote:

>> Unless you have some specific reason why you need to partition it, 
>> you should leave it the way Apple sends it to you, ie unpartitioned. 
>> IMHO.
>
> I would concur with Charles. Especially because unless you know why 
> you're partitioning, you don't know how big to make the partitions.

I disagree.

For general use, I'd recommend partitioning the drive in 3 volumes.

(a) Your work partition. I'd say, about 20GB, but, for X, certainly no 
less than 15GB. This is where your system, apps, and docs live. This is 
also the partition you should back up religiously -- a daily 
incremental backup for your Home folder, and an incremental backup of 
the entire partition every month, or before installing major software 
(e.g., MS Office), or before attempting to repair or optimize the 
partition with such utilities as DiskWarrior, Drive 10, or Norton 
Utilitie.

(b) Your emergency partition. I'd say, about 8GB. This is where you'll 
install another copy of the system, and utilities (DiskWarrior, Drive 
10, etc.) If you have a second drive (internal or external), you should 
use that as emergency volume. You'll use this partition to start up if 
your work partition gets munged or requires repairs that cannot be done 
on a startup volume, or to optimize it.

This is not the best solution, because in some circumstances the entire 
drive may become unusable; it's better to have a second drive. If you 
have a desktop system, a second internal drive is cheap ($70 for 30 to 
40GB) and rather trivial to install. Otherwise, you can get an external 
drive. For PowerBooks, having an emergency partition may still be a 
good idea, because you don't always take your external drive on the 
road.

Why an emergency partition? Well, if your regular startup volume gets 
munged, you can boot off your system software CD or DVD, but you can 
only use Disk Utility, which may not be enough. A third-party disk 
utility usually comes with its own startup CD, but, again you can only 
use that utility. Moreover, the software on a CD is frozen in time -- 
you can't add other tools or update it. It's easier to have a separate 
partition than burning a bootable CD each time you upgrade your disk 
utility or want to add another tool on it.

(c) Your scratch partition. This is where you set your apps to keep 
their scratch files, caches, temp files, downloads, etc. Basically, 
this is where you keep files you can afford to lose; file which are not 
worth your time or money to backup. You can also have an 'archive' 
folder, where you can dump updates or upgrades for your software. When 
it grows to about 650MB you burn it on a CD-R, so if you need to 
reinstall Photoshop or MS Office, you don't need to download again tens 
of megabytes.

f