The Plan for Drive E:
Variable data - Backup & work-drive

On drive E: you should install programs and folders with variable data.

Typically this means programs like:

•   Your E-mail program - You receive new mail all the time
•   Your documents folder - You write new documents every day
•   Your favorite folder - You add new sites all the time
•   FTP-program - You access new sites with new passwords
•   Skype - You change your settings and pals on a regular basis
•   Homemade templates for ex. Word, Excel ao.
•   Your banking software

If a program gives you the choice of saving the settings and the data in another location, you should normally install the program on drive D: and then point the settings and the data to be saved in a folder on drive E:

You can also consider installing your anti spyware and anti virus software on this partition.

•   The advantage of installing them here is that your updates will be there even after a restoration.
•   The draw-back is that if you run into malicious software that is able to corrupt these programs, this corruption will also exist after a restore.

Personally I prefer to safeguard my installation and place my anti spyware and anti virus programs on the D-drive and so included in my imagefiles.

In other words: On this partition you install the things that should not be set back in time when you restore the PC with the image-program. Ex. You’ve received 200 e-mails since your last image-file, so if they resided on the C-drive they would have been overwritten with the old version. You would have lost them.

If the E-drive is your last partition you’ll also have to place the backups here.

The first backup of a clean Windows7 system should, depending on the program you use, take about 6-7 Gb of disk space, so you’ll need a lot of space here.

At present the drive I use for imagefiles can hold 300 Gb.