I beg to differ. Making that number of partitions is more than waste of space, indeed just making 2 is too much.
I happened to partition my sisters 60 GB harddisk into two partitions (45 and 10(yes, Hard disk manufacturers know how to exaggerate, don't they... )) when she got it two years ago, and now she is regularly fed up with wasting 5 GB on the one partition when she needs the space for a video project. If I had not partitioned into two, she would have had those extra Gigs free. She could just copy something from the one to the other of course, but I now realize that my decision was wrong. I have a graphite clamshell with 10 GB which I was sure that I would never need at one time when I got it 3 years ago, so I made a 2, a 3,2, and a 4.3 GB partition because I also thought it could be sweet to have those separate drives. I had then envisioned one for OSX, one for OS9 and one for a Linux partition. Now I regularly run out of space on one of the partitions while there is (some) space on the rest. I must admit that once, I was really happy about the setup, 500 miles from home, running 10.1.x, where a USB-stick partially ruined my OSX-partition, making a rescue without the need for a Real Life Diskwarrior CD only possible, because I had a disk image of it on my OS9-partition. But that was 10.1, and I have not seen any problems like that since, and my harddisk was of course repaired by DiskWarrior, so there was no need for backup. 10.3 has even a journaled file system enabled by default, so crashes that take a partition out should really be a thing of the past by now. Another point against partitioning is that the only way to change the size or number of the partitions is to reformat the whole drive. Not that it is impossible. It is just very unhandy ;-) If your hard disk breaks down, which I think is much more likely to happen, than a partition getting ruined beyond possibility of repair, you will loose everything anyway. A partitioning scheme like Al's is also bound to make problems with updates of OSX and applications, that trust to find the applications folder at /Applications and not at /Volumes/Applications. Sometimes you can fool it with a link or alias, but not always. Similarly I am not convinced that carving up the Very Good Notion of a home directory that is given by a standard installation of OSX is a good idea and can make it very difficult to troubleshoot if you get into problems. And you are bound to encounter problems, as you will run low on space on a partition or two now and then, with so many partitions. For backups, just take the home folder, then you will get both your documents, but also your photos, your video, your email and whatever that can be found in the Library folder, and most backup applications will let you make incremental backups anyway. For me there is no reason to partition anymore, and I certainly don't recommend it to anyone. Apart from my one problem two years ago, partitioning has only given me problems. And if I had my CD's with me, I wouldn't even have needed it. Cheers, Kim On 03/02/04 16:44, "Al Poulin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > You might consider partitions as follows, ins descending order of priority: > OS 9.2.2 (about 4 or 5 GB) > OS 10.3.2 plus any recent updates (about 10 GB) > Applications (for OS 9 and X applications) > Documents (your own stuff, you back this one up most often) > Scratch (if you use Photoshop or similar application) > Emergency (where you put extra copy of either OS 9 or X with repair > utilities like DiskWarrier and TechTools Pro to administer your other > partitions) > Backup (not a genuine backup place because it will not help with most hard > drive problems, but a handy place for a second copy just in case you > yourself mess up one of your documents or applications -- just a quick way > of getting back to work or play) > CD Burn (about 650MB, a place to load up stuff you want to move to CD; it > limits the amount to the capacity of the CDs and you can reformat it each > time to clear the old stuff and set up again) > > Hope this helps, > > -- > Al Poulin > Anger, hate, and revenge are for the devil, forgiveness is for God, > proactive self-defense is for the rest of us. -- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
