A tale of the importance of backups...

[lingyi]

I preach it, many of you preach it and hopefully we all follow our advice and actually do it! Backup, backup, backup, Often, often, often!

Oops, I did it again! I was running low of space on one of my drives and decided to move some data to a new partition on another drive. Almost all my drives are 8TB and I didn't want to install a new drive just for 2TB of data. So I used Easeus Partition master to resize the existing partitions and create a new 2TB partition. All was going well until I did something and realized I needed to restart my PC. Okay, cancel the resize/move operation and restart. While waiting for the program cancellation to finish, I forgot about it and bang! drive is corrupted and all data is lost.

Fortunately, I had a backup. 12 hours later and all the existing data (both old partition and data on the new) are .on a new drive (I'm placing the corrupted drive aside for rotation as a backup)! So all is well because I actually practiced what I preached!

[Phat J]

Thank you for the reminder. I really need to back up some audio stuff I've been working on for months!
Luckily, in all my years of using computers, I've only had 1 hard drive die on me, and I currently have 10 in use including back up drives. Some are approaching 10 years old!

[lingyi]

Remember Murphy's Law my friend, Murphy's Law! ;-p

[lordsmurf]

Another lesson = don't use partitioning software. No good comes of it.
If you still insist, never use it in Windows, boot in the dedicated mode to fiddle with resizing.

[flashandpan007]

Another lesson = don't use partitioning software. No good comes of it.
If you still insist, never use it in Windows, boot in the dedicated mode to fiddle with resizing.

+1, I have same opinion as always

[KarMa]

Fortunately, I had a backup.

What kind of backup media do you have? Another HDD, Cloud, Tape, etc?

[johnmeyer]

I have several comments to make about backup and partitioning.

My main point is that partitioning software is vital to doing simple easy backups and therefore is something you should be using. So I totally disagree about partitioning software being a bad thing.

Why?

Because if you really want to sing the benefits of partitioning, how about being able to restore your entire computer in under five minutes instead of five hours? Partitioning software makes this possible. The secret is to use partitioning software (I use Acronis) to create another partition on your boot drive. The O/S and programs stay on the C: drive, and everything else goes on the D: drive (or whatever letter gets assigned). Then, when you need to backup your programs, you do an image backup of the C: drive. This takes 5-10 minutes on each of my dozen computers. When disaster strikes, you don't have to restore a tearabyte of data, but instead just 20-30 GB of O/S and programs, including all your precious settings that took you months to perfect.

The reason this is needed and the reason it makes such a huge difference is that the only way to backup a Windows O/S and programs is to create an image of the drive, because of all the hidden tricks that are used by Microsoft to protect their intellectual property. You cannot simply copy the files to another drive and then later copy them back. However, if you only have a single partition, and your C: drive is 2TB (or much larger) and if it is pretty full, you then need to backup this entire drive which will take hours and, of course, will require a huge external drive (even with compression). By contrast, once you are able to divorce all your data from the software that runs your computer, your backups get really small and can be put on small drives, including thumb drives. Of course you still need to backup your data, but that can be done with a simple copy operation, or by putting them in a zip file, or by duplicating them on another computer (most of my files exist on several computers).

You'll find dozens of articles about this, so this isn't something I discovered. The benefits are well known.

I've never had a virus or any malware (and I have never used or installed any anti-virus software), but I sure as heck have shot myself in the foot many times by doing something that caused the computer to no longer work as it should. I just reach for my latest backup, and literally five minutes later, everything is just as it used to be.

[_Al_]

Yes, for laptops it is almost a necessity, if getting a new laptop, first thing is to throw away bloatware and create D: for data, and just leave it like that, not fiddling with it later. Just back it up both data on that extra partition or renewing images on system partition. It looks like lots of problems comes when users decide to change it later. op basically did something like that.

[lingyi]

Fortunately, I had a backup.

What kind of backup media do you have? Another HDD, Cloud, Tape, etc?

I use HDDs (1 for 1 size, i.e. 4TB for 4TB primary, etc.) for my primary and secondary backups and consider my original disc (99% of what I have are DVD/Blu-Ray rips) as tertiary.

[lingyi]

I have several comments to make about backup and partitioning.

My main point is that partitioning software is vital to doing simple easy backups and therefore is something you should be using. So I totally disagree about partitioning software being a bad thing.

Why?

Because if you really want to sing the benefits of partitioning, how about being able to restore your entire computer in under five minutes instead of five hours? Partitioning software makes this possible. The secret is to use partitioning software (I use Acronis) to create another partition on your boot drive. The O/S and programs stay on the C: drive, and everything else goes on the D: drive (or whatever letter gets assigned). Then, when you need to backup your programs, you do an image backup of the C: drive. This takes 5-10 minutes on each of my dozen computers. When disaster strikes, you don't have to restore a tearabyte of data, but instead just 20-30 GB of O/S and programs, including all your precious settings that took you months to perfect.

The reason this is needed and the reason it makes such a huge difference is that the only way to backup a Windows O/S and programs is to create an image of the drive, because of all the hidden tricks that are used by Microsoft to protect their intellectual property. You cannot simply copy the files to another drive and then later copy them back. However, if you only have a single partition, and your C: drive is 2TB (or much larger) and if it is pretty full, you then need to backup this entire drive which will take hours and, of course, will require a huge external drive (even with compression). By contrast, once you are able to divorce all your data from the software that runs your computer, your backups get really small and can be put on small drives, including thumb drives. Of course you still need to backup your data, but that can be done with a simple copy operation, or by putting them in a zip file, or by duplicating them on another computer (most of my files exist on several computers).

You'll find dozens of articles about this, so this isn't something I discovered. The benefits are well known.

I've never had a virus or any malware (and I have never used or installed any anti-virus software), but I sure as heck have shot myself in the foot many times by doing something that caused the computer to no longer work as it should. I just reach for my latest backup, and literally five minutes later, everything is just as it used to be.

I use a small SSD (120GB is plenty for me) for all my OS installs and create a clone of that as well an image of the fresh install for backup as well as do regular Windows backups. I haven't done in for a while, but I used to swap out the cloned drive with the original every few months to completely remove any bad Windows updates or unnecessary/unwanted programs I installed in the interim, overwriting the pulled drive with a clone of the backup I installed, so I can always go back to same known/good install.

On my old PC, I had a dual 2.5" drive cage (2 x 2.5" bays in one 5.25" bay) so I didn't even have to physically swap out the drives, just didn't assign a drive letter to the clone.

[lingyi]

Yes, for laptops it is almost a necessity, if getting a new laptop, first thing is to throw away bloatware and create D: for data, and just leave it like that, not fiddling with it later. Just back it up both data on that extra partition or renewing images on system partition. It looks like lots of problems comes when users decide to change it later. op basically did something like that.

Backups should never be done on the same drive as the OS, especially if it's an SSD which when it fails, usually fails completely without warning. On a laptop, if there's an optical drive, I replace it with a 2.5" adapter and put a second HDD in there and use a USB optical drive if needed. If there isn't an optical drive bay, I use a USB drive for backup.

As much as possible, I try to install my OS on it's own dedicated drive with no partitions and install programs and downloads on a separate drive.

[lingyi]

I don't see any issue with partitioning software or creating partitions, especially with large 4TB+ drives. I was the loose nut behind the wheel because I didn't do the project properly because I was lazy. If I had done it properly, I would have either completely removed the too large partition (of course making sure I had backups of everything there) and created the resized partitions in the new space. The process would have been almost as quick as trying to resize the partitions on the fly.

The really idiocy on my part is that as I stated in my OP, this isn't the first time I've done (being lazy) and being burned for it. Hopefully there won't be a next time!

Also, it's been a good while, but I seem to recall that Win 10 had some kind of difficulty or quirk when I tried to setup my 10TB drives (single partition, GPT). I had to switch to the paid version of Easeus Partition Master (the free version only supports up to 8TB drives) to properly setup the drives.

[KarMa]

@johnmeyer

I'm not sure that people are hating on partitions in this thread, just the act of simply resizing an existing partition which is risky. Personally I have a partition on a 4TB drive that I created in order to lock in the fastest part of the drive to a 250GB partition, which I created when I first got the drive. This partition sits on the outer most part of the disk which is the fastest part of the drive. The 2nd partition is 3.75TB and simply used for storage. Just have to remember never to use the storage partition when recording to the faster partition. It's been working great for 3-4 years.

[_Al_]

Yes, for laptops it is almost a necessity, if getting a new laptop, first thing is to throw away bloatware and create D: for data, and just leave it like that, not fiddling with it later. Just back it up both data on that extra partition or renewing images on system partition. It looks like lots of problems comes when users decide to change it later. op basically did something like that.

Backups should never be done on the same drive as the OS

I was not talking (nor johnmeyer) about backing up on that partition, of course that important files (photos, pictures, documents, projects) you back up somewhere else and that has to be done right away when you strip those files from camcorder, camera , phone. You just spread them out. And, the point is you also redirect to that data partition all that data junk, like downloads, configuring your browsers, or other incoming junk, so you are ready at any time to change OS image.

Also , today there are laptops available with extra slots for M2 cards, that is another place to use, or using it for dual boot, because some laptops with windows are stubborn to prepare for dual boot.

[lordsmurf]

I just really do not see the point in Windows partitions. Make folders instead.
Linux, sure.
Mac, nah.

I hated the days of being forced to partition "large" 800mb drives because the OS only understood smaller sizing. I wanted all my files together, not spread into smaller enclaves.

After all, when the drive goes, partitions won't matter. If anything, it makes recovery more complex.

[lingyi]

I use partitions for (edit) four reasons.

First:As KarMa posted, before SSDs and smaller multiple HHDs became affordable, I would create four partitions:

1: A small one for the fastest pagefile
2. A larger one for the OS
3. The largest for programs and files
4. A small one for temp/downloads. This way if there's an undeletable file, I just just format it.

Second: I like to have real drive letters. Yes, I could map folders to drive letters. But I like having all my drives listed directly in the file explorer, makes a difference when you have a large number of drives. I used to map my removable to drive to a letter, but now let them randomly show up as random letter since since I rarely have more than 2-3 active at once.

Edit: Third: Since I don't shrink my DVD and Blu-Ray rips, they fill up even a 8TB drive pretty quickly. So for example, I have one drive with Directors A-H, another with Directors I-J, etc. As I stated in my OP, I had an overflow one drive and didn't want to install a new drive just an additional 2TB, though eventually, I'll need to add a new physical drive when that 2TB is used up.

Edit 2: Fourth: Physical space requirements. When I built my new PC this year, I was planning to install all my drives inside the case. As I thought about it, I don't need 24/7 access to all the drives, so I keep the majority of my drives in external 4 bay enclosures, which are currently all full. So when I needed an additional 2TB of space, I would have to add an additional enclosure which works out to ~$25/drive additional cost (which I calculate into as a per/TB cost when buying new drives). This was the primary reason I swapped out almost all of my 4TB drives for 8TB+ drives. I cut my external storage cost in half.

[lordsmurf]

Edit: Third: Since I don't shrink my DVD and Blu-Ray rips, they fill up even a 8TB drive pretty quickly. So for example, I have one drive with Directors A-H, another with Directors I-J, etc.

I shrink some DVD, not others. (I do MKV rip for BD, usually further encoding down to 720p with 22-ish CRF.)

I'm just amused because my movies are mostly alphabetical (A-H, I-R, S-Z), some by genre (example: westerns), with some broken down by actor (example: Roy Rogers, John Wayne). And spread over 2tb drives that plug into WDTVs.

We have a very similar ISO organization system!

[lingyi]

Edit: Third: Since I don't shrink my DVD and Blu-Ray rips, they fill up even a 8TB drive pretty quickly. So for example, I have one drive with Directors A-H, another with Directors I-J, etc.

I shrink some DVD, not others. (I do MKV rip for BD, usually further encoding down to 720p with 22-ish CRF.)

I'm just amused because my movies are mostly alphabetical (A-H, I-R, S-Z), some by genre (example: westerns), with some broken down by actor (example: Roy Rogers, John Wayne). And spread over 2tb drives that plug into WDTVs.

We have a very similar ISO organization system!

Great minds think alike ls, great minds!

I've thought about going further by actor/actress or genre, but what happens with two or more of my faves are in the same movie? And since the vast, vast majority of my movies are Asian, genres are often mixed. What starts out as a horror movie may turn into an all out comedy in the second half or vice-versa. I do have a dedicated drive for series/variety show appearances of my favorite actresses though (since two or more of my faves rarely appear). Actually this was the drive that was nearly full and I had to create an additional partition on another for.