Has anybody done individual HDD partition image backups to an external hdd.
Specifically I would like to backup 8 partions from two different systems onto one partioned external hdd, being able to take drive c from system 1, and backing it up to partition y on external, then backup drive d from system 1 to partition z on external…
I can’t see where easustodo will do that, and so far haven’t found much on google.
Anything wrong with backing up to image files instead of to partitions?
Just about any partition imaging tool can do that to an external drive.
No problem backing up to image files as long as I can store all the images on one external. Easustodo appeared it would do it, but it will not. Havent seen any documentation for anything, including acronis which suggests it will do that.
Take a look at DriveImageXML, http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm, it stores the images as xml files.
Acronis shold be able to put an image backup on any partition of an external hard drive if there is enough space.
Acronis then has the ability to mount/unmount these images.
At least my version does.
I don’t think that is what you are trying to do though.
If I’m understanding correctly what you want are:
A working copy of each OS partiton on the external .
Which can be accessed & used .
I don’t know how to do that but would like to see some member post the method.
To further expand, say i have Disk 1 with partitions C and D. Partition C is using 100gb of 150gb, and partiion D is using 10mb of 50gb. Then I have Disk 2 which has to partitions E and F. E is 500gb and is only using 250gb, and F is 500gb and is only using 50gb. I only want to have a backup which contains the active data (used portion) of the hdd, and then create an image with that data on my external which would have partions slightly larger than the data portion which i want to back up.
I suppose I could do a work around and use Partition manager to rezie the current partions to where they don’t have all the free space, and then back up those partions as an image or clone. Then after the backup I could put my partitions back to the size they were, with all the free space. But then I have the risk of causing a problem during the partion resizes… I sure don’t want to buy another 5 hdd’s so I can individually clone each one. That would cost me more than buying another computer and making it an exact clone of my existing system.
I would NOT clone from partition to partition in this scenario, since you cannot simply replace the internal harddrive with the external harddrive and boot from that.
Instead I would “image” the partitions to image files on a large (single) NTFS partition on the external harddrive. Any good imaging tool should be able to do that while saving only the active/used data on the source partitions and while compressing the data to some degree.
Tools that I have used which can do this include: Acronis TrueImage (commercial), Macrium Reflect (commercial or free), Clonezilla (free).
The one thing you need to look out for is, that the recovery tool should be able to boot from CD/DVD or USB and be able to see yor internal and external drives on that computer; even those tools that can run from within Windows cannot necessarily “see” all your drives when booted from recovery media - this depends on the software, your hardware, your BIOS settings and probably phases of the moon.
Thanks Drage… I was looking at Clonezilla just a few minutes ago. It just might do the trick. I will have to download it and give it a shot. Biggest problem is that my hdd crashed on my old system the day after I started looking into this. My Inspiron didn’t come with recovery cd’s. 
I do have a full version vista ultimate dvd that I’m going to try to recover the mbr with, and see if I can get it to come up long enough to back it up. timing is everything… I have an older clone I can fall back on, but I would lose some photos…
I did want to do images over clones for this particular backup of both systems.
I made one image with clonezilla, and another with Paragon. Now I just have to unhook my hdd’s, connect a bare try, and attempt a test restore…
I want to make sure it will work when I need it…
I have three systems I’m doing that with.