How safe is Wubi?

[ghosty1212]

Instead of playing around with the Hard Drive partitions on the Ubuntu LiveCD- I have decided to use Wubi. How "safe" is Wubi? Would you recommend to someone who can't back up files at the moment? It's to late plus my car is in the shop. Should I use Wubi or a traditional install through the LiveCD? Thanks. Also do I need to make a separate partition to keep Windows? I have 2 partitions up already.

[Jonathan183]

Instead of playing around with the Hard Drive partitions on the Ubuntu LiveCD- I have decided to use Wubi. How "safe" is Wubi? Would you recommend to someone who can't back up files at the moment? It's to late plus my car is in the shop. Should I use Wubi or a traditional install through the LiveCD? Thanks. Also do I need to make a separate partition to keep Windows? I have 2 partitions up already.

Don't know but backup your essential data first. I have had application installations screw Windows in the past.

[bigtomrodney]

Wubi as far as I know installs Ubuntu into a directory on your Windows partition - so rather than repartitioning it just writes some files out to your system. The thing is if you are worried there are risks associated with both repartitioning and writing to NTFS so if you can backup your files this is always recommended.