I’m in the process of building a new i5 machine. One thing I want to do is have a drive with two partitions with all of the program files on C:, all data files (pictures, Word docs, PDFs, etc.) on the D: with the D: files copied over to a second physical drive E:.
Why? Because either to clean up my Windows after a time or if some catastrophic malware/virus happens, I would want to wipe the C: completely and reinstall Windows and the program files I am using and leave the data untouched. If it is a physical failure and I lose the physical drive, then I can reinstall Win7 and recreate the D: from the E: using restore. In this scenerio, if I wipe C: and reinstall Windows, would I lose access to the data files on D:? What would I have to do to get at the data? Just reformat all of the user accounts like they were before the wipe?
I would just periodically clone my entire C to the E and never have to worry about a crash of software or the physical drive.
You can always repair the Win7 from the installation disk without losing any data.
You could run the restore function from an image file and retain all of your user files in a file called c:backup.
In my opinion, completely wiping out and rebuilding is for the birds. It’s too much work and requires too much updating. I like to clone from time to time, but have never, ever had a software problem that I could not resolve without keeping my data files. I consider it a personal challenge, but I also know I’m only 15" away from an up-to-date complete duplicate copy of a good image.
Assuming that your second physical drive is as large as your primary physical drive, I’d recommend 1) using Windows Backup to periodically make a back up image of your logical drive C: to that second physical drive (the backup image will look to the rest of your system like a single file on that second drive) and 2) periodically back up the contents of your logical drive D to the remaining free space of that second drive.
That’s basically what I do to my home system. The differences being:
My second physical drive is a USB drive (I run my backups overnight, so I don’t care how slow the backup process is, and this way I can physically store that second drive someplace other than near my computer). At work, we have several backup USB drives and rotate them, keeping at least one of them off-site at all times.
Rather than keep my data files on a second logical drive I keep them in my \users\public\mystuff directory (“mystuff” is a name I made up for this purpose and not one of the standard \users\public directories) and tell the Windows Backup process not to save new user directories. That keeps my data files off of the system image backup.
I use Microsoft’s “robocopy” utility (comes with Windows 7: type “robocopy /?” to see its list of option switches) to backup my data directories, with the switches set to only back up the files that have changed since the last backup - this speeds up the process of backing up my data directories immensely.
Note that to date we’ve never actually needed to perform a system image restore, so I can’t speak as to that part of the process. We have, however, had to pull data files off of the data backups more times than we care to admit.
Yes you can access the D drive data files without any problems. You’ll have to restore the programs that access the data files which can be done by the ways already mentioned above. I’ve been using Win 7’s backup program and it’s OK. One thing to look out for is the number of backups that are kept. If you’re not careful, your E drive can be filled up quickly with multiple backups. That happened to me. I ran out of disk space unexpectedly, but fixed it by just deleting the older backups. Otherwise, the backup process works well. Haven’t had to do any restores yet (hopefully never!).