Volumes or Partitions? Which is safe and best for data management for an Individual?

DO NOT partition the drive. macOS is not Windows. One of the things you need to be patient with is learning about Macs & APFS ... and ignoring/letting go of concepts that are "Windows" concepts. For example,

• • Drive letters do not exist in macOS
  • Partitions are unnecessary and can create problems.
  • macOS Updates & Upgrades are complete entities. (No individually updatable dlls, frameworks, etc.)
  • macOS is secured in a Signed System Volume that only the macOS installer can access.

When you install macOS, the installer creates a Container (in your screenshot it is called Container Disk 3) and inside it there are a number of Volumes, only 2 of which are visible in Disk Utility - Macintosh HD & Macintosh HD Data.

• • Macintosh HD is the system volume, containing the "Macintosh HD snapshot" which is the actual bootable system that is secured as what is known as the Signed System Volume (SSV); it is neither writeable nor user modifiable. In your terminology (above) it is isolated from everything else.
  • Macintosh HD Data is the volume that contains all user installed applications, data & app support files. It is writeable. When you install software yourself, the apps are written to the /Applications folder. You do not create a different location (volume, folder or partition) for installed apps.
  • macOS internally links the Macintosh HD & Macintosh HD Data volumes into a single Volume Group called Macintosh HD, which is what you see on your desktop & in the Finder. It gives the appearance that all is one.
  • There are also 3 hidden volumes that you normally do not see or do anything with: Preboot, Recovery & VM. They are part of the system.

You do not create any special container, partition or volume for macOS. It's already done for you when macOS is installed.

In every default installation, your user home folder contains certain folders already intended for the following uses. There is no need, and it is not advisable, to create Volumes (or worse, partitions) for them.

• Desktop
• Documents - most apps default to saving files here or in folders within the Documents folder
• Downloads
• Movies - default location for TV, iMovie and most other video apps
• Music - default location for Music (formerly iTunes)
• Pictures - default location for Photos and most other photo apps

These days, the only real reason to create separate partitions or volumes is if you need to run multiple operating systems. The only case one may want to do it these days is if the computer is to be used by multiple people and you would want to have a common shared data store area.

Just as a quick note if you have not figured it out already, with Apple's APFS file system, what are called containers are the traditional physical partitions. Volumes are a flexible sized entity that will populate a container and will only use up the space of the actual data on them. They will have the same separation as a physical partition from each other but don't have the limitation of taking up a fixed amount of space like a physical partition would.

It's not "volumes or partitions". It's more "hard partitioning vs. multiple volumes in an APFS container" – and the question of whether to put multiple volumes onto a single physical device in the first place.

A volume is basically some physical or virtual piece of storage that has, or can have, a filesystem. With traditional partitioning, you get one volume per partition. But you could have multiple volumes within an APFS container – an arrangement where they have a shared pool of free space, even though they are still logically separate.

If you create a .DMG (disk image) file, then when you mount the disk image, you get a volume. (That volume just happens to be nested completely within another volume that contains the .DMG file.)

Welcome to the Mac community!

You have an Apple Silicon Mac with macOS (probably Sonoma). Use Volumes. The system is designed to use Volumes.

Do not partition the system drive. You risk problems if you partition the system drive in an Apple Silicon Mac. Mac disk structure is radically different from Windows, more secure and perhaps more complex.

Further,

You can certainly create your own folders to contain photos, music, videos, documents, etc. Just be aware that for the most part they will need to be located in your user home folder. (Technically, you could create Volumes for photos, music or videos but it is unnecssary & can easily create problems.)

One more thing, you cannot create a folder at the root level of the drive. It is a security measure.

Note that Apple has made the structure of startup drives more and more complicated over the years, due to their introduction of things like

• Boot Camp
• Recovery Mode
• Fusion Drives
• APFS
• Sealed System Volumes

In Snow Leopard days, there might be a small hidden partition or two (e.g., for EFI use), but normally your startup disk would have a single large partition, containing a macOS volume. Clone the contents of that partition and you would have a bootable backup.

These days, it has gotten to the point where vendors of clone backup utilities are encouraging people to just clone their data, rather than to try to create bootable backups. If you are going to play around with partitioning and with containers, you might want to do it on an external data drive rather than on an already-complex system drive …