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I'm one of the few around here who doesn't separate personal data from the OS. I keep everything on my 500GB C: SSD. All the folders under my user account are still there and will stay there. Pretty much everyone here says it's the way to go. I say bah, humbug. Unnecessary work and a potential source of confusion.

All other data and many programs are installed to my D: drive on a 2TB HDD.

Concern about data loss or having to reinstall for whatever reason is taken care of by having a good, reliable, scheduled backup process.

I backup my 500GB SSD every Friday at 8PM to a 3rd 2TB internal HDD. I also run a program called Mirror Folder which backups up all my important personal data every two hours to a folder on my 2nd 2TB HDD, and some of it across my network to my other computer. I also backup the D: drive every Friday at 9PM to the same drive/partition the SSD is backed up to.

I've never lost a byte of data nor failed to restore an image to a defective/corrrupted/replaced HDD/SSD.

The key to data safety is BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!!!

On visual esthetics, lots of people like the dark theme support in Windows 10, especially since the later 1809 and soon to be released spring 2019 release. Again, I'm on the Ugh team. I don't like dark themes. I find them hard to read and entirely ugly. You on the other hand, may like them a lot. Something to think about.

You'll get used to the square corners (one of the things I miss from Win 7) but over all I think Win 10 is way ahead of Win 7.

Ztruker said:

I'm one of the few around here who doesn't separate personal data from the OS. I keep everything on my 500GB C: SSD. All the folders under my user account are still there and will stay there. Pretty much everyone here says it's the way to go. I say bah, humbug. Unnecessary work and a potential source of confusion.

Add me to your list!

Compumind said:

Add me to your list!

Not me, my data is more valuable than OS or even computer. Also been in Skippy ring, there's to many chances of it getting lost. Further it is from windows, safer it is.

RMJF said:

Many thanks, all. A couple of clarifications.

I'm not upgrading in situ but migrating to a new Win 10 PC from a Win 7 machine. (I did think about having the new machine come with Win7, do a straight port then upgrade, but that wasn't really feasible in the land of Dell).

My first question was for an educational guide / resource, "Everything a Win 7 User needs to Know about Win 10 but was afraid to ask". I've tried googling and get a lot of detail stuff on specific issues but not the general overview. I feel there are some concepts I'm not quite getting. If I have the concepts straight I can usually figure out the details.

Yes, I'll try posting specific threads with a bit more detail. I hope this site is more tolerant of 'incorrect' posts than Stack Exchange ... they are quite, oh I dunno, picky shall we say!

As indicated above, my main issues currently are around the file system as indicated above, and how I should organise it. As well as moving between OS Im going from a single HDD internal drive to dual SSD+HDD.

Also, is there a forum or thread on the visual aesthetics of Win 10? The polite word would be absolutely terrible. Ok, that's two words. (I have more ... ) Its like the new office, absolutely soulless, and more to the point some aspects can be very hard to see. Someone has been drinking Jony Ive's Kool Aid.

Once again, thanks everyone!

I'm on the CountMike's side.. System on the SSD and all of the User data on HD (docs, music, videos, etc)

Reason? At least two:
- I'm multibooting, and it's easy to use the same folders on the other drive from both, or multiple systems. No problems with permissions etc
- I've changed system drive more than once, or restored system Image. All of my data remained untouched (not that I don't have data backup too)

Regarding the name of User folders: When migrating, use local account. Don't let MS convince you to use online one (have to be persistent, as MS will try to force you to use online account). In that case you'll get the proper name of User's folders.
Connect to online account later. There are great tutorials here (by Brink) - for almost everything

CountMike said:

Not me, my data is more valuable than OS or even computer. Also been in Skippy ring, there's to many chances of it getting lost. Further it is from windows, safer it is.

I have all my data backed up separately, as not to put "all my eggs in one basket."
SSD's and bus I/O is getting so fast nowadays, it can't hurt to have OS on one SSD and data on another SSD.

It all depends on what I am building.

For a small system everything goes on one SSD. The price of another can't be justified.
Additionally, I mostly use HDD's for backup purposes.

RMJF said:

Thanks again, everyone.
I do incremental backups every 2 hours and full backups 3 am every day. So that should be Ok. My main issue is that the SSD is only 500 GB (limited budget) and I'm not sure there would be room for all personal data and system etc (my old single C: drive had about 800 GB total, and thats with the image and music libraries on external drives).

Yeah, Ive noticed that theres a whole file structure hanging off OneDrive. Im chewing on that. seems to me:
Pro: Everything instantly available everywhere, no syncing. Con: Duplicate folders (two desktops etc); What happens if no internet access? And likely performance issue. Is that a fair analysis? I think Id prefer to have everything local and perhaps have w few folders shared to the cloud like Dropbox.

OneDrive on Windows 10 (don't know if windows 7 has that feature..) can only put placeholders on your local computer. Everything is not synced immediately. Only when you need a file