I have been building my PC for quite a long time now and I have some important information on it.
System related things are on my C: drive whereas other things are on my D: drive.
Is there a way I can backup these drives to one drive of terabyte storage?
Thank you in advance!
Yes.
Are C and D different partitions on the same drive or are they actually 2 entirely different drives?
What is the occupied space on C and on D?
You'd probably want to "image" C and any other partitions related to Windows. Most likely with Macrium Reflect. All of those partitions in a single image file.
You could also make an image of D, but I personally would instead just use an ordinary "file by file" backup application for data. No need to complicate data backup with something as important as personal data.
How much occupied space on the drive containing C?
How much on D?
Do you have an external drive E or any other drive at all? Preferably NOT a USB flash drive.
Both are 465 gigabytes full, I would go for two terabytes backup drive if possible of course.
I do not have any external backup drive. I will see whether I will buy it depending on the possibility to backup.
OK.
Everything (ALL partitions) on the OS drive totals about 465. An image of all of that would occupy roughly 200 to 250 GB.
A backup of D containing 465 GB would also occupy 465 GB. It would just be an exact replica of D.
So, you would need a drive with a capacity of at least 250 plus 465 GB, which is 715 GB. You could get away with using a 1 TB backup drive temporarily, but I'd probably buy a 2 TB model unless your data is growing VERY slowly.
Backup of C and backup of D would be 2 separate operations. Do each one whenever you want. Maybe daily for D and weekly or monthly for C. Something like that.
There are Macrium tutorials on this site. Macrium will create just ONE big file, with an mrimg extension. Store it anywhere you want on your backup drive. It's just a file and can be moved around like a picture of your cat.
There are a lot of applications that will backup your data, many of them free. I use SyncBackFree. They all work pretty much the same way, but the interfaces will differ. Some are unnecessarily complex and confusing. The result is the same file structure as you now have on D. You can exclude certain files and folders as you wish.
The image of the C drive isn't very useful in mrimg form. That's why you have to formally "restore" it to a hard drive, at which point that drive becomes bootable. Not 100% reliable, but close.
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