Wallet issues on interal and one external with same backups in both but showing different amounts...help please

ok…core wallets have been great to me…they are the only wallets I trust…now my question is why is my external wallet not have my coins in it but my internal drive wallet containing the exact same back up and key is showing I have coins in it…when I spent my coins form the wallet on my internal drive…I tried to zero it out and it gave me back change for some reason…then I synced my external drive wallet and it still said zero…so I sent them to an exchange wallet…wen and bought more now they only show up in my internal drive wallet and the external drive is showing no coins at all…tried -reindex and -rescan already…same backup in both data folders where I have the block chain saved…only thing I can think is that since my external drive is a ssd running to usb 3.0 it is not mapping correctly and my ssd connected to my sata connection is mapping just fine…am I wrong about this…should I maybe just use my external drive wallet with a new address and just store coins on it and use my internal drive to segregate witness transactions or something…maybe use the internal to store coins but then they are accessible through hacking…I need a way to guarantee my external drive is finding all my keys…I have both “coin control features” enabled and “spend unconfirmed change” unchecked in both wallets
also one more thing…I sent coins to a address…everything got confirmed fine and I made my backups like usual then when I sync my external drive wallet it recognizes the transaction but the address shows “n/a” and its like the wallet doesn’t know if the transaction was out going or incoming just that it was a negative number value…
one thing I have not tried yet is -upgradewallet flag but I thought I already had the latest upgrade already downloaded back in janurary…am I wrong about this?
any help please…thanks