Should I delete the Recovery portion of my Laptop's drive?

[marlin_penton]

<p>I have a 80 Gig drive and 8.6 gig is dedicated to a recovery system on a separate partition. I have never had this feature on any computer and am surviving just fine. I could really use the space!</p>

<p>What do you think?<br>

Thanks,<br>

Marlin</p>

[my-portfolio]

<p>The recovery portion really won't help you if your hard drive crashes, you might want to consider some external drives and an offsite backup solution to protect your files and your computer.</p>

[bob_sunley]

<p>That recovery partition has the "original" disk images for the os and drivers for your machine. If you have made multiple copies of the discs, then go ahead and delete it.</p>

[hal_b]

<p>You're better off without it, or any "factory" software solutions. You're best off if you have the OEM Operating System installation disc.</p>

<p>What I do, in addition having the OEM disc, is to create a recovery file of my own on an external hard drive. External GB are alot cheaper than internal for a laptop. My system recovery takes up a paltry 13 GB on my external 500 GB drive. Peanuts. The utility I use is <a href="http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-professional/">Paragon Drive Backup Professional</a>.</p>

[py-photography]

<p>I backed mine up onto a external drive... and used the space.. Seems silly to have 10% of a drive you can't use.. On the off chance you might need to run the restore.<br>

I backed it.. because I back everything up..</p>

[mt4x4]

<p>Get an external driver (or two) and make sure you have backups of anything important.<br /> <br /> If I ever have an error serious enough that I would need to use the recovery software supplied by my OS I would personally format and reinstall anyways.<br /> <br /> Also, just deleting the folder won't really get rid of it. You need to tell your OS to stop making refreshing that recovery folder or it will just reappear.</p>

[sgireland]

<p>If you have created the restore disks I see no reason to keep the partition if you really need the space. With an 80gb drive it would be worth your while.<br>

If you keep regular backups and are running Windows XP turn of system restore to save yourself even more drive space.</p>