Following on from my recent article about restoring Windows in the event it becomes corrupt, I thought I should follow that with an article, a series of articles really because its such a big subject, about how to secure your data and back it up to make sure you never lose any of your files, photographs or music.

First, partition your hard disk

So what’s a partition? Your hard disk is a big empty space, normally called your C: drive, on which you can store your files. Partitioning a drive means splitting that drive up into smaller parts, each of which becomes its own drive. If you partition your hard drive three ways. This will give you three drives, C:, D: and E:. You can specify the size of these drives too.  Let’s say for example that you have a 400Gb hard disk in your PC and your drives are set up as…

C: – Hard Disk 400Gb
D: – DVD Drive

I normally recommend a three partition structure, one for Windows, one for your files and one on which to store a backup of the operating system you can restore from.

C: – Partition 1, Windows, 50Gb
D: – DVD Drive
E: – Partition 2, Files, 300Gb
F: – Partition 3, Backup, 50Gb

The three partitions combined add up to 400Gb, the total size of the hard disk.

What to do before partitioning your hard disk

Before doing any work like partitioning on your hard disk you will need to make sure you have a full and complete backup of all your files, photographs and music. There are several ways you could do this, and I’ll be dealing with backups and backup software more directly in future parts. Some of the things you can back your data up on are…

• Blank CDs / DVDs
• USB Pen Drive
• External USB Hard Disk
• Online backup service
• Home network storage or attached network PC

Partitioning can and does occasionally go wrong, you need to make sure your files are properly backed up. In these cases you can lose all your files, so backups are always important.

How to repartition your hard disk

This is much easier to do in Windows Vista, though there’s a caveat to this, than XP. In Windows XP you’ll need software to do this. A hunt on a website like www.downloads.com will help you find one, but check the ratings given and read the software reviews before you download anything. You’ll need to follow the instructions in the software but there will usually be a wizard to help you through it. The steps you will take are…

1. Shrink your existing partition (your C: drive). I’d suggest making it a minimum of 30Gb for Windows XP and 50Gb for Windows Vista, but hard drives are very capacious these days.
2. Create an extra partition, label it Files and format it (NTFS Quick format is the best option)
3. Create a third partition, label it Backup and format it as above.
4. Reboot your computer

In Vista the process can be simpler.

1. In the search box in the Start Menu type Computer Management and run the program that appears in the search results.
2. In the left hand pane you’ll see the option Disk Management, click on this.
3. You see a list of your drives appear, right click with your mouse on your C: drive and select Shrink Volume.
4. This will bring up details of how much space Windows is prepared to shrink the drive by. Sometimes this isn’t very much, as it’s not really too intelligent a tool. If this happens then you’ll need to find a third-party partitioning tool as with Windows XP.
5. After the drive has been shrunk, you will see a visual representation of how much free space you have. You should right click in this space and create your two new partitions, labelling them as Files and Backup and formatting them, again using NTFS quick format.

Moving your documents folder

Again this is much simpler in Windows Vista than with XP, so we’ll deal with these seperately. Why is this a good idea? Simply put if your files, photos and music are stored on the same drive or partition as your copy of Windows then, if something goes horribly wrong with Windows and you have to reinstall it from scratch, it could wipe all of those files, destroying them forever. Keeping your files on a different partition means that even if you do have to format your disk and reinstall Windows, all those files will be safe.

Windows XP and before

1. Open My Computer from the Start Menu.
2. Go your your new Files drive and create a new folder for your documents, call it anything you like.
3. On the left-hand side of the window that appears do you see a folder list or a coloured panel with a few options in it? If you see the coloured panel press the Folders button on the toolbar at the top of the window.
4. Right click on My Documents in the folder view on the left-hand side of the window and select Properties from the the drop-down menu that appears.
5. You will now be presented with a pop-up window that has three options, Restore Default, Move and Find Target. You should press the Move button and navigate to the new folder on your Files partition that you created in step 2.
6. Windows will now offer to copy all your files to the new storage location for you.

Windows Vista and later

1. Go to Computer in the Start Menu and navigate to your new Files drive. Here you should create a folder to store your documents in, call it whatever you like.
2. From the Start menu click on your name, this will appear just under the picture in the top right of the Start menu.
3. Select all of the folders in the window that appears except for Desktop which doesn’t like being moved. You can click, hold and drag your mouse to select or click each one while holding the CTRL key on your keyboard.
4. Right click on one of the selected files and select Cut (NOT Copy) from the context menu that appears.
5. Navigate to the new folder on your files drive you created, right click and select Paste. Your files will now be moved to this new location.

Next… Part 2, Windows Backup Software