[SOLVED] Best Way to Back Up Multiple Drives to One External Drive?

[fullp2020]

Hi everyone! Looking forward to getting in front of any potentially larger tech issues down the line by performing my first back up ever and would love your advice.

So I currently have multiple drives in my system (a mix of 4 different SSD/HDD, of varying capacities) and I have one, 10-TB external drive. What is the best way to accomplish this? I've looked up some information, but am sort of confused with all the options out there.



Should I just copy and paste literally all of my internal drives into this external drive?

Get software to mirror the same file/folder structures of each internal drive into the external? (Is there also software that would be smart enough to say update the external drive with any changes made in the internal drives?)

Get software to create an "image" of each drive, and save it on the external one. From my understanding, if an internal drive fails, I can replace the drive (would I need the same SSD/HDD capacity/model?) and "re-image" it?

Would also love any specific software recommendations (for windows)

Thank you in advance!

 

[USAFRet]

I use Macrium Reflect for exactly this.
Multiple physical drives, multiple systems....all encased in one folder tree.
Here, it is on my NAS box. But just as easily could be to any external drive of appropriate size.

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[Nemesia]

Same. I use Macrium Reflect and it's amazing.