# Introduction

&partman; is a utility program to help you manage the disk devices, partitions and file systems on your computer.

It allows you to easily create new partitions, create file systems on new or existing partitions, copy, move or delete partitions and also to modify a partition's size without losing the data on it.

To get its job done efficiently &partman; makes use of external tools to support a long list of file systems. You will probably have the required tools for the file systems on your computer installed already.

## Always back up your data!

&partman; has been designed and written with high diligence and an emphasis on data integrity. There is however always some danger involved when modifying a device's partition table or its partitions: There might still be a bug in &partman;, an unexpected power failure or a problem with the computer's hardware.

For those reasons you should always have a back up of your important data before making any modifications with a tool like &partman;.

The program's authors take no responsibility whatsoever if you lose any data while using &partman;.

&partman; uses operations, jobs and commands to logically divide up the work it does. See the glossary for details on this.