[X Newbies] Partitioning Drive?

[Florin Alexander Neumann]

On Tuesday, May 20, 2003, at 16:52 Canada/Eastern, Steven Rogers wrote:

>  I don't see how one could advocate creating disk partitions on the 
> basis that its easier for a newbie than picking files from a list.

What do you use for regular backups? The pickings are fairly slim on 
the Mac, so I recommend Retrospect, which has a decent track record (if 
worse than miserable tech support). Here's an instance. The user has a 
PowerBook, a single partition. I teach him how to use Retrospect. I 
tell him to dump all files he doesn't need to back up into a folder 
called Junk, and show him how to exclude it from the back up when he 
does it. He forgets, and the next back up, instead of taking 10 minutes 
and 1 CD-RW, takes an hour and a half and 10 CD-RWs. He forgot to 
exclude Junk, where he'd dumped a number of movies he intended to watch 
on his next business trip. Of course, he should have stopped the backup 
as soon as he saw how much was going to be backed up -- but he's not a 
'power user'...

> But the key is that usually there is some scheme where files of a 
> certain type or use go in one partition, and the whole question is how 
> big it has to be, and what happens if you guess too small or too > 
> large.

Indeed. But this is not rocket science. If you're an average user, what 
you have are various word processing files, some spreadsheets, web 
stuff, and so on. Few of these are likely to be above 5MB. The music 
and image files -- the really big ones -- those go chiefly on a 
separate partition, and you're not going to back them up on a regular 
basis. So a 20GB partition should be adequate for the average user -- 
provided there is additional storage on a separate partition. If you're 
a graphic designer or into music production or digital video, or you 
need to host a massive database on your machine -- you're not an 
average user and you need a different setup.

f