In a follow up of yesterday’s article about the pitfalls of dual partitions in an enterprise environment, I decided to address a handful of the (several) e-mails I’ve received on the topic.

The majority of e-mails argue for the maintainability of user data. It’s easier to protect data from Windows than to run the risk of incorporating the data entirely into the same partition. While I agree in theory (And indeed, standalone or small LAN stations can work ideally in this regard), it still leaves security concerns in multi-user environments.

One gentleman accused me of not using my administrator privileges to change security settings as necessary. Again, in a small LAN environment, this is not difficult. I can easily change permissions over files and folders manually. The problem comes in an enterprise environment where there are 500, 1000, or more users and multiple users use multiple machines. Every time someone accesses a machine and saves data, we would need to follow behind and set privileges. This is insanity and not realistic at all.

Rick brings up a good point, however, in that if users were forced to keep data on network shares, the power of Active Directory could be leveraged to enforce security. While this too is true, we do not yet run AD. We also cannot force users to save data to network shares. Backup ability or not, users should be encouraged to mirror critical data on the server and their local workstations to prevent data loss in either place.

While dual partitioning should not necessarily be thrown out in all cases, the purposes behind it should be examined on a case by case basis. Innovation in business always comes when people begin to think outside of the proverbial box and examine the methods behind their madness. The method behind the madness for dual partitions began well, but since technology has changed, so should our methods.