I have actually moved my documents folder to a different location than the Windows default, but only because I copied them from a backup when I bought the laptop. In the past I used to have my personal documents on a drive other than C, but with the laptop I didn't think to partition the C drive and to keep the documents separately in the other partition.
You could make a small partition, say 40GB, and be OK. Use the free program Partition Wizard 12.x
Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Wizard Free
I wouldn't make the partition any bigger than that, less if you need less. 20-30GB would probably be better.
One question comes to mind. Say I move the User accounts to another partition, leaving Windows, Program Files and Program Data on C drive. If I have to do an image restore on C drive which for technical reasons happens to be days old, would I have to restore the Users accounts on the other partition to the same date as the image restore on C or would the User accounts not be dependent on the state of the C drive Windows etc. programs?
That's exactly the sort of situation I try to avoid.
There are > 101 pages of comments following that tutorial- please try searching them to see if that question has been addressed, else pose it under said tutorial.
Example - part of the issue you raise:
Move Users Folder Location in Windows 10
Consider the possible implications for creating an image, transferring an image, and restoring one should your PC be unbootable...
Lots of issues and scenarios are discussed there... happy reading!
Having learned that one can move the Users folder to an internal disk only, any benefit would be questionable since I have only one internal disk on my laptop. It should be noted that my goal is to have an image backup in case the disk fails. Hence I need to image the whole physical disk irrespective of how many partitions it has.
Actually not quite correct. You only need to image the used parts of selected disks and partitions. The imaging program does that for you. You just tick the box for each partition or disk.
True, you can do a 'forensic' image- exact copy of every cluster- but for normal purposes that's inefficient in time and storage space.
And remember image sets consist e.g. of base image (first, full) + a set of incremental or differential images.
Quote