Mac-user but just got a new Acer laptop running Win8. Have read about and wondering whether to create a backup partition, or even to start using File History.
Any thoughts on best practice to save me time/effort/blood when I get problems down the road??
You really should be backing up anything important ( docs/photos/music/etc ) to an external device rather than having your "backup" stored on the same set of spinning platters in the same rather fragile laptop.
It probably already has a restore partition
As above, it probably has a recovery partition, but you should probably also do your own recovery disks.
Before adding any software, always do a system restore point. It seems to work really well. I just installed some software that didn't install properly. It didn't cause any problems, but I just wanted to get the system back to how it was before the install and luckily I'd had the foresight to create a restore point prior to installing.
Windows should create restore points fairly frequently too.
I'd back-up to another drive, rather than a back-up partition.