Oh my god Loose rivets.... are you trying to pull our legs or what ?
What gripes me is - HP in particular - the recovery disc putting everything back to square one. Getting rid of HP-itis is bad enough, but then I find they've kindly removed my partitions.
Well yes, the point of a recovery partition is to recover the partition to the "out of the box" state. Want more than that ? Use a third party solution... there are plenty out there that will take your backup in the form of a snapshot clone if that's what you want.
EDIT to say. I have a Seagate Blackarmor network drive, but I have no way of knowing
The old adage goes, don't bother doing backups if you're not going to bother doing test restores. A broken backup is of no use to anyone.