Partition Your Hard Drive for Another Step in Protection

It seems like every day you're hearing of a new virus hitting the internet. There's lots of software programs out there, both free and paid, to help protect
your machine and the valuable information that you keep stored there.

Whether you're a business person or just a die hard home computer addict, we all have all those photos and other items stored on our hard drives that would be almost impossible to entirely replace if they were wiped out with some nasty little virus.

I have lost many things in this way over the years. Always planning on burning everything to a cd, but never getting around to it and then one day it's to late
because it's all gone!

One way of protecting what you keep on your hard drive is to partition it into sections. The first section would of course contain your operating system and the
other sections would hold whatever data, photos etc you have.

The benefit of partitioning a hard drive is that if for some reason the operating system gets corrupt and you have no choice but to reformat and re-install your
operating system, the other sections of your hard drive can remain untouched still holding all your valuable information and family photos.

Of course, partitioning isn't a 100% sure thing for protection. If your hard drive is damaged physically, reformatting and reinstalling isn't a option,
everything on the drive is lost.

About the only option I know when this happens is to invest in some sort of recovery program. I have had the misfortune to have to resort to using some of
the free data recovery programs to try to salvage some of the things on my drive. They have only recovered a small amount of what I lost and it usually seemed to be the things that I didn't care to lose in the first place.

I can look back to when I first got a computer and laugh at myself now. I was so nervous, thinking that somehow I'd end up finding the one button that deleted
everything and wipe it clean.

Out of necessity and a lack of the money to run to a computer shop every time something went wrong, I have used search engines to learn to do almost anything I need done to my computer.

Partitioning isn't hard to do, it only takes a little extra time and it could possibly be the extra steps it took to still have those irreplaceable photos of a
baby's first birthday.

So, if you're planning on upgrading to a larger hard drive, or if you have no choice but to reformat your old drive and start from scratch, keep in mind that
partitioning is just one more step in protection.

Partitioning will also allow you to use different operating systems on the same hard drive. When you start your computer you will have the option of which
operating system you'd like to run for that session on the computer.

A quick search with any of the online search engines will give you the correct instructions to partition with the operating system you'll be using. It may be
the extra little precaution that saves all of your valuable info.