A note on backup: Even the reputed professionals don't always understand.

A weekly newsletter just received from a usually reliable computer news/media source offers advice on setting up a new computer, getting rid of all the free crapware, and selecting the "accessories" you want and dismounting what you don't want.

The article offers the "sage advice" that you should partition your monster hard drive and back up the working partition in the other partition. (It was written by a substitute for the usual chief editor who was on holiday?)

Since in my experience 90 percent of drive failures are mechanical, in 90 percent of the cases in which you might really need a backup from which to restore, both partitions will be dead. You won't have a backup when you need it if you follow this advice (although you'll have a nice one until you need it).

It's NOT A SAFE BACKUP unless the backup is on a separate physical device from the stuff you're using. This can be a separate physical hard drive, or CDs/DVDs. I've found DVDs unreliable in longer term storage, and CDs somewhat marginal; and if you have much to back up it can take a lot of them which - means it takes a lot of time to make them. Recovery, especially from DVDs, also is a lot slower than you'd expect if you haven't tried recovering significant amounts of data from them.

Separate Hard Drives probably are best, if you can manage it, unless you have what I'd consider a very small amount of stuff to backup.

John