create a separate partition for tmp and paging file

['chris']

hi

Is it a good idea, before WIN2003 server setup,
to create a separate partition for the tmp directory and windows paging file (pagefile.sys)?
Perhaps will be easier, exclude this whole partition from the backup, to get more free space on the tape.

[P Muralidhar Kini · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,

While creating paritions, one sugesstion would be to create partition in a way to
seperate user data from OS data. Should there be any problem with the OS
due to which a OS re-install is required, then this can be done without having
to move your user data.

>> Perhaps will be easier, exclude this whole partition from the backup, to get
>> more free space on the tape.
Yes. This is a good idea. It will avoid the manual overhead of setting the TMP
directory to NOBACKUP or PAGEFILE.SYS to NOBACKUP and so on.
This way your backup's will be short/precise and will take less time.

You can refer to the following link for backups of Windows 2003 server-
http://www.ilopia.com/Articles/WindowsServer2003/Backup.aspx

Regards,
Murali

[Igor Karasik]

Two notes:
-Most of backup software automatically exclude pagefile from backup
-It is preferably to create partiotions on different physical drives in order to increase performance

['chris']

Thx, but Backup Exec 9.1 seems to not exclude windows pagefile automatically.

[P Muralidhar Kini]

Hi Chris,

>> but Backup Exec 9.1 seems to not exclude windows pagefile automatically
Do you mean that the exclude list of this backup software does not include
the pagefile.sys by default?

I think excluding the pagefile.sys for backup's varies from application
to application. Ideally one would want these files to be excluded by default
but there some backup application that dont(Looks like Backup Exec 9.1 is a
example for this).

Regards,
Murali

[P Muralidhar Kini]

Hi Chris,

>> Perhaps will be easier, exclude this whole partition from the backup,
>> to get more free space on the tape.
If you are just intrested in skipping the tmp directory and pagefile.sys from
getting backed up, then you can add these things to the backup exclude list.
This would be a one time task.

However if you want the general advantages of creating a partition (like say
seperating user and OS data so that reinstall of OS can be done without
affecting user data and many other advantages) then you can go ahead and
create multiple partitions.

Also having multiple partitions will give you the flexibility to install multiple OS in the system, in case you have such a need.

Regards,
Murali

[Colin_29]

There are a couple of reasons for creating separate partitions.

One is for performance reasons where you may wish to separate the operating system from data and likely have a third partition for log files (SQL-Server for example). This is only relevant if you have separate physical volumes, say RAID1 for OS, RAID5 for data and RAID1 for logs (at least 7 disks in all). It largeley depends on the size of your system and user base.

Another reason for separate partitions would be to allow you to use disk quotas.

Also, it's a ten second job to exclude files from Backup Exec so not worth considering.

Hope this helps
Colin

[P Muralidhar Kini]

Hi Chris,

Other Partitioning benefits -

* Files in the disk are accessed in units of clusters. By having different
partitions, you now have have the option to set differnt cluster size for each
partitions. Based on how each parition is going to be used (i.e. what kinds of
files are going to be created..), you can set the cluster size accordingly for
performance gain.

* Your scheduled activities such as defragmenting the disk, would now have
less work to do as each parition is of lesser size. you can infact schedule
each partition to get scheduled at different time. Hence each run of
defragmentation would now take less time.

* If your paging file resides in a seperate parition, then it wont not get
fragmented as in case of a single partition. Based on system usage,
paging file will get resized (increase and decrease) but since it is using a
different partition, it would not get fragmented much.

Regards,
Murali