One of the most important policy of forum is: one post one question. Overmuch question will make your post unclear and lengthy, then some forum users may lose interest in...
For your concern:
Yes, Win7 and Win10 backup images are two completely independent backup images. The different creating time I mentioned is just point to their name, you know, when we create a system image, the image file will be named as a format like: Backup YYYY-MM-DD HHMMSS. You created two image file, of course they have two names, according to the create time, you can which is win7 and which is win10.
>So if for instance in 5 years I decide to make this PC a windows 7 machine, I could restore using the win7 windows backup image that I'm about to create?
Is it possible/done/considered good practice to do the partition idea?
Yes, you could and it is a good idea.