How The Backup Process Has Changed

I'd go with inertia too.

Splitting up your fs into more than one big lump still has advantages 
(putting your data somewhere else allows you to blow away the rest more 
easily: you can hive off filesystems as a whole onto remote storage 
slightly more easily: it keeps them safe from each other being corrupted 
to some degree; you can mount them readonly and so on) but IIRC the only 
advantage of swap partitions these days is that they're guaranteed to be 
contiguous.