In the past I have either had 2 drives (in Desktop a 250 Gig SSD and a 1Tb SATA), or with SATA single drives , have partitioned them with about 2 – 25o gig as C drive and the balance as D.
I have kept OS and programmes on the C Drive and moved User data to the D drive(s) , then used Macrium Reflect to make images of the C Drive and Freefilesynch to make mirror copies of the D Drive data.
With a new laptop, that has a 500gig SSD, and similarly when setting up a granddaughter’s similar PC, I was advised by a local expert not to partition a SSD .
I have made Macrium images of the whole C drive that now has the User data on it. In trying to run Freefilesynch for the User folder there are all sorts of exceptions thrown up, eg stuff from the AppData. I do not want to use OneDrive. I have installed a micro SSD of 64 and 128 gig respectively as a D Drive and set back up in Windows /System/ backup, but am not exactly sure how that works. I don’t want to use cloud . I would be grateful for suggestions bearing in mind my preference for Macrium, Freefilesynch and no cloud. Should I reconsider partitioning? Ideally not, but suggestions are welcome.
NB The reason for not just using Macrium is it takes longer than Freefilesynch and is more difficult to extract the data alone from it. I use USB HD's for the backups.
At the moment I have little data on the newish laptop. Total C drive usage 100 gig. Macrium takes about 10 mins. In view of the peculiarities of Dell, SSD etc, I think I will abandon partitioning. I will continue with Macrium weekly but I have found I can use Freefilesynch to Mirror image selected folders - for example music, pictures. documents etc. I can , in addition to the Macrium images, make Freefilesynch copies of my main data in this way more frequently and very quickly indeed as more data is added. Will try this out when I have time.
PS I realise this will create duplicates but my data will be more accessible on another PC and I have a number of USB HD’s acquired over the years