Separating user files from the OS drive
 

Had an interesting conversation this morning with someone. We were talking about new computers/workstations. I had mentioned that I prefer to have a separate "drive" for my user data, whether it would be a physical or logical. The other person said it was too much of a hassle and no real point as long as you kept the data in a separate folder (ala My Documents). I'm curious what others think about this. Do you use a separate "drive" (can be NAS or anything) or do you just put your user data (documents or media or whatever) in another folder?

There is no right or wrong, Just curious if I'm one of the outliers on how I organize my files (given the choice) or were they? (As long as it works for you, that's cool)

Separate drive always, then I can easily reformat/reinstall the OS without impacting the files. Can’t do that as easily if it’s just a folder on the system drive.

That was part of the logic I had too. But they said it added additional work... But being able to wipe the drive (my preference is a physically separate drive vs a partition) while having the data safe is so convenient (and not having to restore from backups).

All my user data is on the same drive as the OS, but is backed up to 2 different cloud services, and also to my NAS. So, not an issue if I need to rebuild.

I'm assuming in your case downtime would not be significantly different if you had files stored on a separate drive. I have my critical files on a NAS and a computer at my brother's (offline unless I need to make changes or updates).

I’m not sure how exactly it’s extra work, beyond equipping the machine with a second drive in the first place. I’ve never stored files in My Documents or any of the other predefined folders that would normally go on the system drive, so I don’t do any work to remap them. I think iTunes might be the one piece of software I had to do a symbolic link for. I suppose if it’s a shared machine it’s more work to get everyone on board with that kind of approach though.

Maybe my storage volume has forced my approach. On a laptop, I’m of the opinion that everything should be SSD these days, but on a desktop PC, I use SSDs for the OS and a limited set of files that materially benefit from the technology, and massive hard drives for most file storage since $/TB at the scale I’d need to actually store everything is prohibitive in SSDs.

I'm not entirely sure either. About the only additional work I do when I rebuild my box is that I disconnect my data drive before and re-attach it after the rebuild to ensure that I don't do the dumb thing and take out my data drive (doesn't actually matter because I'd have backups but still)

I agree with the desktop but with a proviso... I cap the size of that drive to 4Tb. The main reason being if the drive fails, then I'm not spending too much time getting back up. The critical stuff first and get up and running. Then the not so important stuff gets copied over dinner or overnight. But I don't want to spend too much time doing a restore.

For laptops, one of my must haves is a second HDD/SSD slot (2.5 or m.2,). If it's m.2 and nvme, then I will limit that to 1Tb (and that's already expensive enough).

On my desktop computers, OS is on the C: drive, user data is on a separate D: drive, and My Documents folder is a OneDrive folder inside the user data folder.

For my laptops, I just link my OneDrive folder to the My Documents folder.

I don't bother doing this anymore. I do have a second drive for large files (I'm into photography) but everything else I have including the OS fits easily on a 1TB SSD. I haven't had one fail yet and can't remember the last time I had to reinstall Windows. And everything is backed up locally as well as to the cloud. If I had to wipe one of my machines, it is easy to restore the data to where it belongs.

I re-install my OS (Windows or Linux) every few years to have a clean install. There have been improvements over how clean things are, but I find the speed improves (big or little) when there has been a fresh install. It often also reclaims some space when I do it. That said, just doing a copy usually doesn't impact me much because of how I do the restore. Barring something unexpected, I can be back online (on that computer) in a few hours and fully restored within 24 hours.

That said, I have been avoiding backing up files to the cloud. While we haven't really seen a big breach, I'm sure it's coming and I'm sure the compromise will be bad too...

Everything is a balance of risk and convenience. Chance of losing your onsite backups vs having an issue with your offsite. It would probably be safer to store an encrypted copy on an external drive and keep it in a safe deposit box but that is definitely inconvenient to update. There are cloud services that offer zero knowledge encryption on the server side but ultimately there's always some client program that needs to be able to decrypt the data. This is what I do for my cloud backups but it really depends on you trusting the client application. Personally, I'm not too concerned.

With SSDs and cloud backup options out the wazoo, this is much less of an issue today than even five years ago.

But I still partition any new laptop hard drive with a D drive for data (if for no other reason than alliteration!).

My work computer points My Documents, Pictures, Desktop, and a couple others to our OneDrive. I assume they could easily reimagined the laptop and point it to my OneDrive instance, where all my docs would be.

Actually I'm setting up syncthing right now to see if it'll work as how I want it to (and a friend would like something similar). Currently setting up two older boxes and then will deploy one at a remote site to see how well it performs. Then will add a third node. Ideally I'd like to set up something on a few miniPCs (or even VMs) to keep the operational costs low. But for testing purposes, it should be fine. Technically it is a "cloud" but one that I would have more control over...

Personally, my critical files (eg, scans of sensitive documents or my password file) are encrypted (yes, I am paranoid sometimes) but it still doesn't hurt to take a few extra precautions.

I have my OS/Programs on an SSD and my files on a HDD, but mostly due to size/space considerations when I purchased the PC. Anything over a 128GB SSD was pricey at the time.

But even looking at a new machine, 3TB of SDD doesn't seem to make economic sense - I'd probably still stick with a 500GB-1TB SSD and a 2GB 7200RPM HDD and keep them separate.

I suspect recovering my files from cloud backup and migrating to a new computer will both be easier if/when I need to.