you ever get an answer on this?

No.

I went ahead and bought Acronis and am going to use that instead.

yes, a few weeks ago Dell acknowledged the problem with ext drives and said they were sorting it out with a new update which became available yesterday, guess what... it still doesn't work!! everytime I try create a backup recovery or system I get "an error occurred... " really irritating that Dell cannot get something as basic as this sorted out!

I gotta say, the acronis seems great.

My New Version of Dell Backup and Recovery Version 1.8 (I think) just upgraded 4/5/2015 Crashes always a Dell Tech tried twice to reinstall it (over 1 1/2 hours) and now it's worse, it says it's optional, I wish I had passed and kept the old version I have a rather new 5547 with 8.1, Thanks

Basic version of Dell Backup and recovery cannot be used for whole system backups. Only the Premium version has that capability. Windows has a perfectly good system image utility that can be used to store on an external hard drive. It's hard to find in Win 8. Open File History and look at the lower left corner. 

I have Premium edition which is not working at all

agree - wish I had passed also..

I went on the twitter site- four hours and they only they could say was de-install, download and re-install- even after I told them I had done that three times.

not the way to rebuild a reputation.

I asked for refund, $40 for broken (useless) software is just a waste imho...