Large external HDD for backup - Partition? Image and Synctoy?

Pretty sure your drive emulates 512.

Seagate do a free app. for that purpose.

( Macrium is a popular freebie I don't think macrium free supports gpt or large drives )

Might be the new version of discwizard that you want for that.

make sure you get the right version - they have several
here is a direct link v14387*English

Paragon free will be ok too if you prefer something less intrusive:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/

I'd be interested for my own education: Can this HDD be formatted as MBR with 2 partitions? If so will it support Windows or free Macrium imaging?

SIW2 said:

Can this HDD be formatted as MBR with 2 partitions?

Only up to 2.2 tb. Bit of a waste.

I thought the MBR partition table had the 2.2TB constraint on the size of a partition and the start of a partition. In which case 2x 1.5TB partitions should be fine. Have I got something wrong here?
I think you may need Partition Wizard to do it. Unfortunately I don't have a 3TB HDD to try it out.

SIW2 said:

2.2tb for the disk.

I can't dispute what you say but the MBR partition table specs don't seem to support this. Also, I'm sure I've seen others elsewhere claiming they have done this.
I'll go away and do more homework.

SIW2 said:

You can do that thing of using 2mbrs but I don't like the look of adding extra complication.

Yes that's what this also states
3TB Hard Disk Utilities « The Data Cloud

I was going on this
"Sector indices have always begun with a 1, not a zero, and due to an early error in MS-DOS, the heads are generally limited to 255[citation needed] instead of 256. Both the partition length and partition start address are sector values stored as 32-bit quantities. The sector size is fixed at 512 (29) bytes, which implies that either the maximum size of a partition or the maximum start address (both in bytes) cannot exceed 2 TiB−512 bytes (2,199,023,255,040 bytes or 4,294,967,295 (232−1) sectors × 512 (29) bytes per sector). Alleviating this capacity limitation was one of the prime motivations for the development of the GUID partition table (GPT)."
from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

SIW2 said:

Yes, it is confusing.

It is because you can have one partition taking up the whole 2tb drive.

Hence the max partition size.

I'm only persisting because I'm not happy until I understand the constraint.
I don't understand your last explanation. Firstly we have a 3TB drive and 2 partitions of 1.5TB meet the partition size and start constraints referred to in my reference.

PS: I don't care if I'm wrong.