Parallels

[steve harley]

they whom i call Chad Leigh wrote:
> 
> On Mar 1, 2007, at 3:27 PM, steve harley wrote:
> 
>> they whom i call Chad Leigh wrote:
>>> Except there ARE differences.
>>
>> as for whether partitioning is more "voluntary" than adding a drive, 
>> i'd say the practicalities of laptops might be seen as "forcing" 
>> partitioning for some purposes;
> 
> For general use, when?  Why would a laptop force you to partition?

if you want multiple volumes, for any reason, but you don't want 
to carry around an external drive; i won't engage the "special 
needs" argument -- i don't see evidence that many people 
partition drives in the first place without having a "special need"

>> also, the sheer size of huge drives can be a problem; for example it 
>> can be handy to make a bootable clone of a boot volume, but this is 
>> not as easy when the boot volume is 500 GB
>>
> 
> Again, special case.  You can make a disk image bootable clone of a boot 
> volume, can't you? 

you can, but you can't boot from it, so it won't be very useful 
in an emergency; but that's beside the point -- the hassle of 
cloning a 500 GB boot volume isn't reduced by cloning it to a 
disk image

 > Otehrwise, why would you do
> this on the same disk?  

you wouldn't, that's not at all what i was suggesting; you'd 
clone the boot partition to a volume on another drive; 
controlling the size of the boot volume facilitates this process; 
other space-consuming data (usually media files) can be stored on 
another volume and backed up separately; also, don't assume that 
a bootable backup only protects against physical drive failure

an alternate strategy is to keep the home folder on another 
partition; this allows reinstalling the OS while preserving the 
home folder; Mike Bombich does this, for instance