Is partitioning hard drives on Mac OS X recommended or advisable?  (Based off a Super User submission)

There is certainly no problem with creating another partition for your user data (aka home folder). In fact, this is a very common thing to do on *nix based operating systems.

In fact, with Leopard & Snow Leopard, it is as simple as opening System Preferences, going to the Accounts Preference Panel, and choosing Advanced Options.  Relocate your User directory, and reboot…

But is it necessary?  No.  What about backing up the user data?  On the Macintosh, if you need to reinstall the OS, you do not necessarily need to lose your user data, and applications.  The normal installs & upgrades, will leave your data and applications intact.  The only time when your data is in danger of being lost is if you do a Erase & Insall.  The Install & Archive, or simply install, will leave everything intact.

But still, backing up all your data on OS X is as simple as copying your Home directory, which shouldn’t take long to do and restore. Do you really need to go through the hassle of partitioning  if it is only for a once-off occurrence?

Anytime you partition your drive, ask yourself, what happens in two years when I run low on disk space?  When you partition the drive, your making it virtually impossible to repartition it later.  Both partitions have to have free space, to allow you even consider resizing the partitions, and often it’s unlikely that Free space will be in the right sections of the hard drive partitions.

The concept of seperating “user” space, and Operating System space has existed for a long time, but didn’t become popular in the mainstream until Windows NT, and Windows 2000 arrived.  Even then, in the Windows world, often it’s not usable in the this pure form.

Instead, you had hard core gamers, that would create a “main windows” partition, and create a secondary partition that contained their backup image, the current set of drivers, the installers for their games, and applications, and possibly their user “data”…  After all, with Windows, you have to restore the OS, and applications, since the registry has to be preserved.  You can’t just restore a game, or application, without the proper registry settings…