Partitioning a hard drive is the thing to do, although it doesn't rise to the level of 'saving the PC' from all that ails it

This Jason Hiner article at ZDNet is a long-winded way of saying that partitioning a drive — carving out separate areas on the physical hard disk that separately hold the OS and the user's data — should be the default way all operating systems are installed.

I agree. I do it all the time. Since I don't spend much time installing Windows and OS X, I don't know how hard/easy it is to create and use separate partitions for data. I know that since OS X is Unix-based, it should be easy and a lack of ease in this shows a lot of short-sightedness on Apple's part.

For Windows, this kind of thing should be mandatory. I haven't seen a Windows XP installation that couldn't benefit greatly from a full reinstall after more than a couple years in service.

But ... whether you have your data in a separate partition or just in the /home or MyDocuments folder on a solitary partition, none of it matters if you don't have complete, up-to-date backups of your user data — meaning all of your files, important and otherwise.

Because even if you have your "/home" files in a separate partition, it's all too easy to blow away said partition when you're doing a reinstall or fixing a problem.

So from that perspective, I'll say that partitioning a hard drive can make things easier and even more secure, but using one huge partition ain't the end of the world if only you have everything backed up and are keeping those backups current.

Note: I have a certain "way" of partitioning my Linux hard drives for the desktop:

I start the drive with Linux swap. Opinions differ on how much swap to use, but it does depend on the amount of RAM and disk space you have. Mine go anywhere from 500 MB to 2 GB. The goal is to use swap sparingly or never, but with this partitioning scheme, you can increase or decrease the size of any or all of the partitions with little trouble in Gparted.

My next partition is the /root partition where the OS will "live." This is a primary partition, for those who know what that means. I make this as big as necessary and then add a bit more. These days I like a 10 GB /root partition. You could go 20 GB if you have a huge drive, or you could go 6 GB or even 5 GB if you are having space issues. I'm not comfortable with less than 5 GB.

Then I turn the rest of the drive into a secondary partition (thanks to Gparted running from a live CD, usually PartedMagic in my case, this becomes blissfully easy after your first few times doing it). Within that partition I create a logical partition for /home that fills up the entire secondary partition. If for some reason I need to create one or 20 extra logical partitions in that secondary partition, I can easily do so.

And if I have to give more space to /home and less to /root, or vice-versa, I can do that without worrying about /swap being in the middle (because I purposefully put it at the beginning of the drive). It's an easy operation in Gparted.

I'm sure there are better ways of doing this, and some think that since the beginning of the drive is accessed the quickest that you should put something that sees more action than /swap there (and remember, the ideal for me at least is to NEVER access /swap), but this layout works well for me.

I have a graphic of this somewhere, and I'll try to pop it into the top of this entry at some point in the near future.

But this is a long way of saying that Jason Hiner's plea to "save the PC" by using multiple partitions as a rule will do that (i.e. "save the PC" from extinction). It's just the right thing to do. But making backups is more right, and that's what I want to tell all dozen of you who happen to be reading this entry.