Partitioning new iMac?

[WRD]

I'm about to order an iMac as soon as Leopard is available and was wondering if it's a good idea to split the hard drive(500GB) in two partitions? The reason I would want to do it is to move my home folder to one partition and keep all my stuff there, and then have OS X and my apps on the other.

That way, if I screw something up with the system and have to reinstall or if I want to do a fresh upgrade sometime in the future, I won't have to think about all my files on the "Home" partition.

I read about moving the Home folder here:
http://www.macworld.com/2002/06/secrets/osxsecrets/

Is it safe to do that? Or can it screw something up? And is at all beneficial now that Time Machine can take care of any backup work that I might want to do when installing a new system "from scractch"?

What are your recommendations on partitioning and Home folder location?

Thanks

 

[richard.mac]

its perfectly fine to do this. i have two partitions one is my system and the other one is a data partition. the system partition has everything on it except my docs and music etc which is on my data partition. i did this so can quickly defrag and cache my smaller 20 Gb system partition to make the OS spped and boot times extra fast.
the macworld article you linked is if you run out of space on your hard drive and you want to move your home folder which has all your documents to another one. since you have a 500gb hard drive you would not need to do this.
i suggest you leave your home folder on the main boot partition as it contains caches and applicaiton files in its library essential to make your system faster. just move your pictures, docs, movies, music folders to the second partition.
what i have done is make my original docs, music etc folders in my home directory invisible and made new ones on my second partition and just dragged all my documents and media into their respective folders.
i suggest using ipartition as its a non-destructive partition tool. you can make partitions using disk utility but you have to do while not booted into your main partition and it erases your partitions after.

 

[richard.mac]

my method would be very beneficial with time machine as you would just set it to backup your media and documents on the second partition. besides thats the only thing that would use TM for. if you lost anything system specific you would just reinstall the OS on the system partition.
yeh BUT then youd loose all your preferences in your home folder and your apps.
on second thoughts maybe it would be better to move your home folder to a second partition. TM would take care of the home folder. but i dont know if OS X knows how to handle the home folder not being on the boot partition. i think you have to have it on the main partition. sorry to ramble on!

 

[WRD]

Yeah, It might work smoothly with TM, I have some time to think about it. I guess it's not that big of a deal anyways given that TM exists and seems to be quite customizable as of what should be backed up.