Preparing an External HDD as backup drive

[Wilbri]

I am about to take delivery of a new Western-Digital WD10EZEX Blue 1TB 7200rpm SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive which I will be installing in a spare Vantec NexStar 6G Black 3.5" SATA III 6 Gbp/s to USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure.
The purpose of this drive is to backup my three internal drives, namely 2-SSD and 1-HDDand I am not sure how I need to prepare the drive to achieve this. Should I format and partition the drive into 3 partitions in order to accommodate the internal drives according to the various sizes and what else is would be necessary to ensure that the system will perform according to my requirements?
O.S. Windows 10 64 Bit.
I look forward to receiving advice from the forum.

 

[USAFRet]

What application are you using to do this backup?

What sizes are your current drives?

 

[Wilbri]

What application are you using to do this backup?

What sizes are your current drives?

My apologies, I intend using Macrium Reflect as my backup application.
1 x 125 GB SSD
1 x 240 GB SSD
1 x 1TB HDD (Identical to the one used in external drive above._

 

[ArtPog]

Presumably you'll be using a disk-cloning (data-migration) program to clone the contents of your three disks to your new 1 TB USB external HDD.

I assume you haven't had any experience with any particular disk-cloning program and you would opt for one of the free versions available on the net. There are quite a few as a Google search will inform you, however, I'll mention one - the Macrium Reflect Free program which is quite popular with PC users. It's available from...http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

It's a relatively easy-to-use program for your purposes so you may want to give it a try. Macrium will create the same-size partitions of each source disk on your 1 TB destination drive, i.e., (approx. numbers) 125 GB, 240 GB, and 600+ GB. I assume you would have no problem with the d-c program configuring the destination drive with that partitioning scheme. (I'm assuming, of course, that the TOTAL data contents of the three source drives is less than the disk-space capacity of the 1 TB destination disk).

There's no special preparation needed to "make ready" the destination disk to become the recipient of the cloned contents of your source drives.

 

[Wilbri]

Presumably you'll be using a disk-cloning (data-migration) program to clone the contents of your three disks to your new 1 TB USB external HDD.

I assume you haven't had any experience with any particular disk-cloning program and you would opt for one of the free versions available on the net. There are quite a few as a Google search will inform you, however, I'll mention one - the Macrium Reflect Free program which is quite popular with PC users. It's available from...http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

It's a relatively easy-to-use program for your purposes so you may want to give it a try. Macrium will create the same-size partitions of each source disk on your 1 TB destination drive, i.e., (approx. numbers) 125 GB, 240 GB, and 600+ GB. I assume you would have no problem with the d-c program configuring the destination drive with that partitioning scheme. (I'm assuming, of course, that the TOTAL data contents of the three source drives is less than the disk-space capacity of the 1 TB destination disk).

There's no special preparation needed to "make ready" the destination disk to become the recipient of the cloned contents of your source drives.

Thank you for your reply ArtPog
Yes I already have Macrium Reflect free edition installed.
This will be the first time I will use this software but I am reasonably confident that I will be successful in using it as I have viewed quite a few demonstrations on you tube and also have downloaded and printed a copy of the user manual for reference to the cloning procedure.
The total present content of all drives is at present 222GB.
I will however size the partitions for each of my SSD's to suit there total usable capacity, namely 119 and 223 GB.
thus limiting me to a total of 658 GB max GB for my 1TB HHD which is acceptable to me at present.
I plan to clone each drive separately for safety sake, but if I copy you correctly you appear to indicate cloning al drives simultaneously. Is this permissible?
Following this I plan to setup a backup facility for each drive based incrementally.

 

[ArtPog]

Yes, you can clone the contents of the three source drives simultaneously (each in turn, of course) using one instance of the Macrium program. Naturally this assumes all three source drives are currently connected in the system at the time of the d-c operation.
On the other hand, you could simply clone the contents of one of the three drives, then reopen the Macrium program at some future time and clone the second source drive, then ditto for the third source drive. Whatever is comfortable for you, although there would not seem to be any reason why you should not simultaneously clone all three source drives in one fell swoop.

Just remember to be very careful in selecting which disk is the source disk and which disk is the destination disk during the d-c operation.

 

[Wilbri]

Yes, you can clone the contents of the three source drives simultaneously (each in turn, of course) using one instance of the Macrium program. Naturally this assumes all three source drives are currently connected in the system at the time of the d-c operation.
On the other hand, you could simply clone the contents of one of the three drives, then reopen the Macrium program at some future time and clone the second source drive, then ditto for the third source drive. Whatever is comfortable for you, although there would not seem to be any reason why you should not simultaneously clone all three source drives in one fell swoop.

Just remember to be very careful in selecting which disk is the source disk and which disk is the destination disk during the d-c operation.

Thank you.
As a first timer I have elected to do one disc at a time for reasons described in your closing sentence.