backing up 2 different pc's on one drive

I just bought a external usb hard drive bay and was wondering if I could back up to different computers on 1 hard drive. I have a 300gig 7200 drive.

 

You should be able to if you partition the drive first. split the drive into (2) 150 or so gig partitions and use one partition for one machine and the other partition for the other machine. Make a careful note which partition holds which backup.

 

What do you mean by "backup"? Do you want to make a disc image that you can restore in case something goes wrong? Or do you want to make a 1-to-1 clone? Or perhaps you simply want to backup all the files?

In any case, all of these are possible.

 

Yes I want to do a "image copy" 1 for my laptop and 1 for my dek-top. Is there a way to partition my external hard drive with windows 7 ? I would like
to split my 300gig hard drive in half.

 

You don't need to partition the backup drive. Most backup programs will just create files (or a folder) for the archive. You can put the archive folder wherever you want... you don't need a separate partition for it... as long as you're ok with going through a restore process when you want to retrieve the data. The restore process will recreate a partition from the backup archive files.

 

I think the OP wants to "ghost" or "clone" his existing partitions and use the images as backups, in which case I believe that he will have to partition the drive - one per image.

 

I probably wouldn't use ghosting at all, but I even more wouldn't ghost two computers' drives onto one drive because:
- It would waste a lot of disk space, compared to an image backup to compressed archive files.
- The main advantage of ghosting/cloning is that the backup can just be swapped into the computer in place of the regular drive, without any restore process, if the regular drive dies... however, with two computers' drives ghosted onto one drive, you lose your ability to (easily) back up or resstore the other system if you do that.

EDIT: I guess another advantage of cloning is it's easier to access individual files from other computers if you want, so it may make some sense from that perspective I guess. In any case, yes, if you want to make ghost/clone -style backups, then make 2 partitions. If you'd rather use image archives, which are more space-efficient and flexible, then you can just make a couple folders instead.

 

What I did was made two folders on my 300gig external hard drive labeled one lap-top and the other desk-top then I did a "image drive" of each and put it in there respective folders. If either one of my computers crashes
I should be able to restore it back again. Hopefully this will work.

 

Fair enough - I've long since given up asking why most people want to do what they want to do; it sufficeth, in general, for me if I know how to do what it is they think they want to do. So I'm a lazy schlub, eh.