Partition portion of External HD for System Files Backup

Well, what is confusing us is that it is impossible to have a Drive C partitioned as logical disk drives C, D, E.

Reference this screenshot of my disk management:



My computer has 2 physical disks attached. Both happen to be internal SSDs but that is irrelevant.

Each disk can have multiple partitions. Each partition can be assigned only 1 drive letter. You can't have Drive C: be partitioned into C:, D:, and E:. It's just impossible. My Disk 0 contains Drive C: and Drive E: - two separate partitions. My Disk 1 contains Drive D: and Drive R: - again two separate partitions.

What it sounds like you want to do is create 2 different partitions on 1 external hard disk. One partition you want to use for system backups and one partition you want to use for data files. Yes, you can do that. And yes, you need an image backup and incremental backups. Your base full image backup you want to make when you know everything is running correctly. Then you want weekly incremental backups because Microsoft issues updates on Tuesdays and any one of the Tuesday updates may break your system.

Do I understand correctly:

You have an internal hard drive with partitions C, D, and E.

Your "music files" are somewhere on C, D, or E.

You want to "back up" EVERYTHING on those 3 partitions.

Is that it? Or are your music files NOT on C, D, or E?

Do you have ONLY a single internal hard drive, albeit with several partitions?

"Music files" can typically be backed up with any old file backup program.

A C partition containing Windows can only usefully be backed up with an imaging program of some type.

I don't see why a backup of music files or Windows would require any particular partitioning scheme on a destination external hard drive.

If your music files are on C, they would be included in any image made of the C partition, but you could of course make a separate backup of music files only without imaging, using a garden variety file backup program. That's probably preferable anyway, even though an image of C would capture them.

@1ThursdayJC,

My apologies if my response was too complicated. The gist of what we are all saying is that we are having a little difficulty fully understanding all the specific details of what you are trying to accomplish. Please try to directly answer the questions posed in the past couple of posts and feel free to add as much detail as you want. The more details that we have, being as specific as possible, the better.

I know that sometimes finding the correct technical terms can be difficult, but that is perfectly okay. Feel free to be descriptive and put things into general terms.

That said, let me try paraphrasing what I understand the issue to be. Please correct any details I do not have right:

You have a physical drive in your system that is divided into several partitions with the drive letters C:, D:, and E: plus a DVD drive with the drive letter F:.

You would like to add an external drive and create two partitions on it with the drive letters K: and L:.

K: will be used for the purpose of holding backups and L: for data storage.

Does that sound about right?

If so, tell me where you are right now: Do you already have that external drive partitioned in K: and L: or do you need help doing that first?

Let's begin with that before we get into other details.

Your assessment is correct.

Maybe I am using the wrong terms. That is what we used to call things back during dos days.

Thanks for all your help I am going to mark this as solved even though it is nor resolved in my mind.

Though I marked this as solved I have come to the conclusion that a backup drive should just be that. So I will just use the other external drive as a data drive. Thanks for most of your suggestions.

@1ThursdayJC,

If you are happy with the information that you have, great, but if do still have questions, don't get discouraged! We'll be happy to help if you still have further questions.