Originally Posted by
mikew99
Perhaps it's because I cut my teeth on Unix, but one of the (many) bad design decisions that Microsoft has made with Windows is the practice of dumping everything in the same partition as the operating system, which makes backing up your data, upgrading and reinstalling the OS far more complicated than it needs to be.
There are many bad design decisions in Windows, and many more that are not inherent to Windows but which are design conventions with how most companies/developers write software on Windows. That is not one of them.
There is no advantage, on modern hardware, on either Windows or Linux (or legacy Unixes) of putting /home or c:/Users on a separate partition; a separate drive may make sense in some cases, although even there, it's not any easier to back up data in its own partition than in its own directory.
Upgrading in place is no different.
Reinstalling the OS is not substantially different, although the default assumption Windows makes of
wiping the underlying partition is a problem with the installer (it's actually gotten worse in newer versions than older; up through 7 it was trivially easy to reinstall in-place.)
The real problems are the tight binding of user settings to the registry, using globally unique user IDs without an easy way to recreate them, and the lack of containerization of apps as typically installed.
The former isn't an issue at all on Unix-like operating systems (no similar system object to the registry, although that comes with its own minuses), the second is handled better on Unix (although it comes with its own difficulties in managing accounts across machines; NIS and AFS anyone) and the last is every bit as much a problem on most versions of Unix as it is on Windows (and in both cases, in the MODERN versions of the OS, it's the fault of the application developers and not of the OS.) Any time an application requires root access to install on Unix/Linux-- and that's an awful lot of them -- you know that's a sign it's doing something that won't be easily backed up from /home. Indeed, there isn't even a good convention about where to put system-level other apps: /usr/local vs. /opt ?
you might consider creating a separate partition and placing your personal programs and data there. That will greatly facilitate future reinstallations, because you can wipe the OS partition without affecting the vast majority of your data.
That's a downright dumb thing to do for programs;
in general, non-trivial programs will have installed things to WinSXS, to the registry, and possibly to C:/Program Files/Common Files/ and then won't work.
I have heard of programs that claim to automatically preserve settings during a reinstall, but these rarely provide details of how they work. (Even Windows itself offers a "refresh" option.)
For systems-levels settings, and for Microsoft Office, Windows Easy Transfer on Vista and 7 worked pretty well.
Frankly, though, whenever I must go through the hassle of reinstalling Windows to get a fresh start, I want my start to be
completely fresh.
In general, I recommend it; short of that, doing a refresh install (running an "upgrade" to the same version in place) is usually the next best step.