Windows 7 - Partitions for a 1TB External Hard Drive

Hey,
My sister bought a new external hard disk(1TB Western Digital My Passport) for me. This is my first hard disk so I want to know how many partitions should I make in it. What is the ideal number? Should I format it before using? What should be the ideal allocation unit size?
I want to back up everything that is on my PC. I have a 250GB hard disk on it that is almost full so I was thinking of making one partition of that size but I am not sure please suggest. And I will keep adding photos,music,movies,games and other random stuff to it. So please suggest what should I do.

Thanks,
Chinu

Im not sure you can partiton a external all you need to do is have a folder for each catagory ,ie my music ,my movies etc then add them to the library and everything should be fine

I wouldn't bother partitioning it. Just manually back up, or use a program like SyncBack SE, to mirror your internal hard drive files there - and remember you could also store at least four incremental Windows backup images on the external drive too.. .

Have a read of this tutorial.

Backup Complete Computer - Create an Image Backup

If you want to make things easy for yourself you could create just two partitions on your external hard drive: one to backup a full system image to, and another for your personal data.

As for partition sizes, you'll need to decide that for yourself, as you are the only one who knows how much data you are backing up.

You can partition it, I did to my 500Gb external, I ended up getting rid of them though.

I just keep my backup images in a folder, and folders for my other saved items.

Partitions just end up limiting your storage or needing to be resized.

Derekimo is absolutely correct. I have a 1.5TB storage drive that I partitioned to use for 2 different things. I now find that one partition is too small and the other way too large. I'm going to have to transfer the files from 1 partition somewhere else in order to make 1 large partition and put the data back again. I wish I had just left it as 1 partition and used folders.

On an external drive used for storage and backups, 1 partition...PERIOD. The only time I do 2 partitions is when running an OS on the same drive. I do an OS partition, then a partition for data and everything else. In the event of a Windows reload/restore/reimage...I simply overwrite the C drive leaving all of my data and important bits on the D partition.

Thank you guys