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Right hard drive organization is very important not only for better PC
performance, but also is a vital part of a computer security and data
protection.
Partition
your hard drive.
First of
all, if you haven’t done this yet, you should
create at least one more partition on your hard drive. Great tools to do
just that are GParted or Easus Partition Manager. Having two partitions is very convenient, one you would use
for the system files and another for your personal information. In case of
Windows crash, it’s not going to be a huge problem to just format system
partition and install fresh copy of windows. So I would suggest keeping all your
movies, pictures, music, documents, and installer programs on your storage
partition.
Have
an external hard drive for back – up.
Having
another partition on the same hard drive is a smart move, but not a panacea.
What if you’ll burn your whole hard drive? External hard drives are not
expensive nowadays, and it’s definitely something worth spending money on to
have peace of mind. You can keep backup files on it, big files or even image of
your clean, well working system drive.
Defragment
your hard drives.
Defragmentation is a process of getting rid of fragments between files, or
putting files next to each other. So it will increase speed of accessing files
on hard drive and hence improve your productivity. My favorite tool to use for
defragmentation is MyDefrag, but there are many other good ones like
Defragler or
Smart Defrag. Even
built-in Microsoft Disk Defragmenter does the job, although very slowly.
Create
system of folders with descriptive names.
You can have
Music, Movies, Documents, Software folders for example. Then in Software folder
create subfolders for the same kind of software tools like CD/DVD, GAMES,
MULTIMEDIA, SYSTEM UTILS and so on. Whenever you have downloaded some nice
article or piece of software try to classify it and put in appropriate folder,
or create a new folder for specific type of information.
Back-up,
sync, and create images with DriveImage XML.
There are
many hard drive imaging software, but I suggest DriveImage XML. It is powerful,
free utility to back-up your information. One particular useful thing I use this
software for is to create image of my system partition and then burn it on a
DVD. So in case I need fresh Windows on my computer, I don’t have to run all
that tedious Windows installation process, drivers and necessary software
installation, and configure whole system the way I want it to be. It’s completely
tuned-up and ready to use, sitting on my DVD. Then I am able to copy it to my system
drive or just run it from DVD.
Other great
hard drive and files organization tools:
Total Commander,
WinOrganizer...
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