Larry,
I'm not sure I agree. When you lose the OS portion of a drive, you lose a ton of information. You lose all your settings. You lose all your updates (and with Microsoft having updates daily not, that's a crap load of updates). You lose any shareware you mistakenly did not back up or can no longer find the key. In the past, when I had backups of my OS drive and the drive went down, I simply bought a new drive and restored from (at the time) tape. That was it. After my tape drive went down and I didn't have a backup of my OS, I had to reinstall everything, and I had to repurchase some programs I lost. It can take days to reinstall and get the OS back to where it was before. Not only that, but to get the data on the data drive, you have to be savvy -- you have to find out where the data is kept (say, for your email programs), and have the program use the data drive. This is time consuming and confusing, especially after you reinstall and no longer remember how the heck you did that in the first place. I still like backing up my OS drive and will continue to do so.
