Some food for thought.  If you are "backing up" your user data to the same physical hard drive as your operating system, just a different logical partition on the hard drive, think of what happens to your backed up data if (when) the hard drive fails.  The data is gone and you have no backup.  The same way with the Dell recovery partition that will allow you to reinstall if needed, if the hard drive fails that is gone and the only option is to reinstall on a new hard drive with discs. I use Acronis True Image back up software and back up my entire hard drive (all partitions) to a separate hard drive (it can be internal or external).  I do periodic backups, at least every two weeks and sometimes more,  so if something were to happen I haven't lost much.  Also, backing up all the partitions on the hard drive, if the drive were to fail you can restore all partitions to the new drive including the Dell recovery partition and the Dell diagnostic partitions.  Otherwise the Dell recovery and diagnostic partitions are a factory only item, not something a user can recreate. I do PC support and this is what I recommend to all my clients.
Sometime in the last while something has changed. I used to be able to access " \ \ Backup Set " and manually delete the old backups that were taking up space on my D:. Now, whenever I try to open the folder " \ \", I get this message and am unable to get past it:   [IMAGE]  Because of this block now, I cannot free up space on my D: to do any more backups in the future. It is especially annoying because Windows Vista Help actually has an entry about "How do I delete a backup that I created using the Back Up Files wizard?", and the instructions walk you through how to go to " \ \ Backup Set  " and manually delete the old backups. I had been doing this for years, but noticed that... sometime in the last while something has changed.  Any help on how to get around this warning would be much appreciated.  ***I am wondering if deleting the folder " \ \" would be the solution because it would delete all my old backups, and then Windows Backup would simply recreate that folder again (now empty) in order to start a new backup? Just a thought though? 
Blocked by Dell from Deleting Old Backups Created by Windows Backup