Macrium Reflect image question - dedicated drive?

dictum, I totally understand. SoFine's idea is a good one and probably the most practical. The price, as you know, of good brand external drives is reasonably low. Off the top of my head, $50-$60 for a 1TB USB 3.0 drive. No reason at all you could not make multiple copies of the quarter century of cherished archives, and stash somewhere safe. Making a separate "DATA" partition is a piece of cake. Then backing up that partition on a regular basis, by itself, to one or more externals, would give you piece of mind for your archives, and reduce the time and size of your Macrium OS backup considerably.

You'd still have it on-line for quick access, but away from the OS partition and any potential mischief from MS updates and the like. Just good data management. Give it some thought. Only you know what's really important to you to keep right at hand, and what can go off-line for safe keeping (but accessible if needed).

You're on the right track...............

dictum said:

My 4TB external USB disk keeps timing out 1/4 of the way through the copy.

More info, if you have it. Error messages, screenshot of what it says, Macrium Log, the VSS log, anything.

dictum said:

It's not a Macrium thing, whenever I do anything with those drives, they go on and off.

I wonder if I need a driver for them.

They are SP Silicon Power external drives 2 and 4TB.

Check in Device Manager. Right click the drive and Update Driver. It may find nothing. Or look on the vendor's site. I'm not familiar with that brand of external drive.

Maybe in the end, it would be best to open a new thread in Drivers and Hardware - Windows 10 Forums. Members who know a lot about drives/hardware and drivers frequent that thread.

Just a thought: I have repeatedly run into trouble over the past couple of years when trying to run drives larger than 2 TB in a dual-USB 3.0 drive dock. If that's your situation, you might consider pulling one of the two drives when writing to the 4 TB drive. OTOH, if you give your 4 TB drive its own exclusive access to a USB 3.0 channel, then you won't run into those drop-out problems. I can share links to blog posts about discovering and fixing such problems if you're interested. Don't want to inflict this upon you unless you ask.
HTH,
--Ed--

dictum said:

I think I've had issues with the 2TB drive as well.
It keeps flashing on and off. As in you can write to you for 20 mins and then it will say F: unavailable and restart the process.

I copied some of the essential folders to it. Mostly data though I tried the entire C:\users\*\ folder.

Are you using a Dock or Hub as Ed suggested?