In my last piece, I talked about the usage of hard drive space for spool,work, temp, and other types of files. I also talked about the mainframe concept of separation of this data onto other 'volumes'. This is done not only for the streamlining of backup processes, but for performance and fragmentation reasons as well.

How do PC users implement a similar strategy?

Disk partitioning. Partitioning of your hard drive is a concept that goes way back. Many use it, but how many really utilize the partitions in a useful fashion?

On my old Win95 PC with its 4.3GB hard drive, I had three partitions, C, E, and F (Don't ask me why).

C was the main area (about 2GB) and held the main Windows system files.

E was the place for my HTML files, pictures, documents, and other relatively permanent type files. About 1GB of space was allocated to this partition.

F was my temp partition. Spool, temp, work, swap files - all the stuff that was temporary in nature, varied dramatically in size, and caused the MOST fragmentation was placed in this partition.

Why?

The C drive was performance sensitive since it contained the most frequently utilized files. By keeping them isolated and avoiding fragmentation, this partition remained pretty well protected.

The E drive was the one that required the most frequent backups since it was MY data. Fragmentation occurred according to how much I did on the PC. So automatic defragmentation (via Norton) was scheduled weekly. Backups (to Zip disks) were performed every other week as incremental backups. Once in a blue moon, I did full volume (of the E drive) to tape media.

The F drive was the disaster area. The maintenance of this partition took on a life of its own:

• Resizing the swap file. The swap file can and will grow, unless specific settings are utilized. I tried to allow the swap file to be as big as needed but some programs would go haywire and grow it to unnecessary propotions. So periodically, I would boot to DOS (remember the good ol' days?), delete it and allow Windows to recreate it at the smaller, default size.
• Wipe cache in browsers and delete cookies/history. IE, Netscape, and eventually Mozilla all kept "stuff" all over my F drive. Even when performing the deletion through these browsers, it would leave behind trash. I would then go to Explorer and delete the leftovers.
• Recycle Bin cleanup. Yeah, if you know how to toy with Windows, you can move the Recycle Bin to a different partition other than C. I rarely used the Recycle Bin. (Shift-delete is permanent deletion, bypassing the Recycle Bin. It's something I do almost automatically and almost never regret.) 
• Of course, proper planning ahead saves problems later. The defaults for Recycle Bin size and usage can be adjusted so it does not "hold" a certain amount of space (if available) by default. This can also be done for browser cache, etc.
• Once I had pretty much cleaned out the F drive, it was manually defragged (checking for errors of course). But since this partition contained only data temporary in nature, it never required a backup.

I managed to decrease the drives that required backups and amount of data requiring backups, as well as isolate the data that DID need backups to specific places. I cut back dramatically on fragmentation in the "systems" arena, therefore providing better performance. I eliminated the many errors that normally mess up the C drive since the majority of these errors occur now on the F drive (Those temp files are killers)!

Registry backups and maintenance.

Few people realized, at least back in the Win95 days, that the registry can grow and grow and grow. Even fewer bother to back it up.

First, Windows automatically backs up the registry on reload of Windows. By default, according to the operating system, you have one backup and it is overlaid each restart. Some operating systems allow multiple copies. Few people know how to use these backups. I do not depend on those backups, although I have had to at times. REGEDIT allows you to "export" the entire registry to an export (backup) file. Knowing how to use this export file as input to an "import" command is necessary or the export file is worthless.

Not going to document the steps here. It's out there on various sites, but you should find it and print it so if you need it; it is available to you. Remember, if the registry goes bye bye, you ain't easily getting to the Internet to figure out how to fix your problem!