Harddisk management and backup strategy

Marc de Ruiter · Post by **Marc de Ruiter** » Mon Jan 26, 2004 11:25 am

Lately I installed a second large harddisk in my system.
HD 0 has 12 10GB partitions
part 1 contains OS program and swampfile
part 2-12 audio backup

HD 1 has 12 10GB partitions
part1 samplefiles (copies of sample CD's)and ghost image of HD 0 patition 1
part 2-12 audio

On each audio partition I created a batchfile
containing this line:

Xcopy *.* [destination partname] /M /E /C /R

After working on a song all I have to do is starting the batchfile in that partition and every change will be copied to it's "twin backup partition" on HD 0. Backup takes only a couple of minutes. So there's no reason to pospone and forget...

Why 10 GB partitions? To limit the movement of the harddisk heads to a region of 10 Gb rings.

Post by **Guest** » Thu Jan 29, 2004 10:43 pm

i recently read a article on HDD management in an aussie PC mag. They recommended that a partition be split up into a max of 3 partitions due to issues with performance and efficiency.

imo, having a total of 24 partitions will make your life a hell, it's gonna be very confusing to manage all your data.

as with everything, follow the KISS - keep it simple stupid

Post by **hubird** » Fri Jan 30, 2004 7:50 am

Marc, just a question, doesn't slowdown that number of partitions the boot process of your computer?

Marc de Ruiter · Post by **Marc de Ruiter** » Wed Feb 04, 2004 4:11 am

Hubrid,
Not that I notice. Certainly the benefit -less average seek time- is much bigger than the splitsecond more boottime.

Vien,
Ofcourse it's only manageble if you store for each song every sample, project or other data related to that song in one directory. Do you have an other way to avoid your data to be scattered over a HD of 120Gb than partitioning?

valis · Post by **valis** » Wed Feb 04, 2004 7:27 am

Diskeeper

Post by **Guest** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 9:25 pm

combo of sensible partitioning and defragmentation.

eg. split hdd into 3 partitions of 40gigs, with regular use of a defragmentation program, eg. diskeeper.

Micha · Post by **Micha** » Mon Feb 09, 2004 8:36 am

For working/experimenting I have 4 dirs work1 to work4 8GB ready to format if finished. Backup is 40 GB. Recording also, just in case I have to record 10 old tapes in 32bit. Oh, almost forgot, 10 GB burnit, ready for DVD. So no defragmentation.

Marc de Ruiter · Post by **Marc de Ruiter** » Tue Feb 10, 2004 6:14 am

The subject of this thread is of course the XCOPY command and it's capacity to copy only changed files to an other HD. I don't believe anyone is interested how you guys format your disks, unless you did it while there was audiodata on it. ...

....and didn't used the XCOPY command before...

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Marc de Ruiter on 2004-02-10 06:17 ]</font>