How to back up Windows 7 on Boot Camp to a Mac-formatted external drive?

apple.stackexchange https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/4096

  •  16-10-2019
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Question

I have MacBook Pro with latest Snow Leopard on it. I just bought an Iomega eGo external HDD for Time Machine backup.

I also run Windows 7 on Boot Camp partition and I normally use Parallels 6 to run it, but I noticed that Time Machine does not backup Boot Camp partition.

I went to Windows 7 Backup and Restore tool to see if I can backup Windows separately but it didn't recognize my Iomega HDD probably because it's Mac-formatted.

I discovered MacDrive that allows Windows to work with Mac-formatted disks. I'm wondering if that will allow me to use Windows Backup and Restore tool to backup to Iomega HDD.

Will it work?

What is your Boot Camp Windows 7 on-site backup strategy? I'd like to avoid buying another external HDD for Windows...

Was it helpful?

Solution

I keep my documents on the Mac side as I'm pretty much only using Parallels to run my BootCamp install, so that way they're backed up. I don't really mind doing a fresh reinstall of windows if something goes wrong.

OTHER TIPS

Using Snow Leopard Disk Utility, I made three partitions on an external hard drive:

  • HFS+ for Time Machine
  • MSDOS, subsequently converted to NTFS, for Windows 7 backup
  • EXFAT for shared media e.g. iTunes Library

I have not yet made a final decision about what backup package to use for Windows 7. At the moment, I'm using Microsoft's Windows 7 backup solution, with manual image files, and trying to keep any data files in the Cloud.

I do not yet have even 10 days experience with this setup.

WinClone

Saves your whole Windows installation as an image that you can restore later. Excellent for backing up and restoring Windows bootcamp installations, but the developer is gone, but the software may still work though.

Some people say it works on Snow Leopard, while it doesn't. I'm planning on using it in a hard drive upgrading, but that's just me. Should work fine though.

I'm using iPartition and Disk Utility for this. Makes sparse images (i.e. doesn't copy empty space from Windows side). Could be more automated, but I'm pleased.

See my blog from 2/2011 on this: http://openduck.blogspot.fi/2011/02/backing-up-boot-camp-partition-with.html

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