Do I still need to backup the Recovery Partition?

I have a XPSL 502X laptop that came with a Recovery Partition (R) to restore the system to its original Win 7 factory image.  The third party system image backup software  that I use invariably assigns  both the R and the C partition as the 2 partitions to backup to create the system image.  Since I have already migrated to Win 10, I cannot see myself reverting back to Win 7, let alone the Win 7 factory image.  Since the R should have never been changed in its day to day operation, can I just ignore including the R in creating the system image?  Furthermore, can I even delete the R partition since I will not be using it anyway?  Will deleting the R partition cause any repercussions?