Do we need partitions to backup for MAC?

Are you saying under Windows you partition a drive and then back up to the partition? If so that's just a bad idea no matter what given that if your drive dies you lose both (you'd lose the data that way on Windows or OSX).

Partitioning isn't a great idea whenever you can avoid it. If you must do so, the first partition gives the best performance. OSX defragments in the background as much as possible, but if you fill the disk too far (say past 80-85% capacity), you can still end up with random writes and fragmentation. If your finder is sluggish, I'd suggest Disk Warrior.

Can you go into a bit more detail on exactly how you're using this partition in Windows?

 

PC manufacturers usually partition their hard drives in two from the factory, with one partition being for the windows install and the other for data. It's meant to be useful when having to reinstall windows as you could install it on the partition that had windows on it, and keep your files intact in the mean time.

OP:You do not need to partition your hard drive, and honestly, keeping a "backup" on the same drive is about as stupid and useless as you can get. If your drive dies, it won't matter if you have a backup partition, all data will be lost anyway.

I suggest you acquire an external hard drive with as much(or more) capacity as the one inside your MBP. Backup using OS X's built-in time machine which works great. And if you want to be extra careful with specific files, I suggest you open up a drop box and iCloud account to backup those files to the Cloud so that they will never get lost, no matter what happens to your external or internal hard drives(I do this with each semester's files and documents for school, once the semester ends, I remove them from the cloud as they are no longer needed).

 

My recommendation for backing up your data on a Mac would be to purchase an external disk drive and either use it with Time Machine or manually copy your data by hand on an interval that you prefer (such as every other day for example).

If you choose to use Time Machine, I would recommend a disk drive that has the same capacity as the disk drive in your MacBook Pro - so if you have a 500 GB internal disk, then purchase an external 500 GB disk. This will give you plenty of storage capacity for keeping incremental backups for quite some time.

Time Machine is pretty easy to use. I simply set it up, then choose to plug my external disk in every night to make a back up of my data which only takes a few minutes (unless I've made a lot of changes or added quite a bit of data to my system). It's nothing like trying to deal with backing up your data on a Windows PC.

 

That typically isn't the case with Mac OS X so you shouldn't need to reinstall things very often, at least from my experience and from what I have also heard from others.

 

Lion has a recovery partition, similar to what the PC world has used for quite a while.

Always back up to an external device, better yet have 2 or 3 externals and keep one in a fireproof box. I prefer SuperDuper over Time Machine as I like the ability to quickly restore if software update or an app screws something up.