Backing Up a Partitioned Hard Drive

Spoom182

I have 17" Macbook Pro with a partitioned hard drive. About 80 gb are on the mac and only 11gb are on Windows xp. My question is this: can I use the Time Machine accessory on my Mac partition to back up both the Windows and Mac files on the overall hard drive?

darkphoenix22

I use a combination of Time Machine, Mozy and Winclone.

Time Machine takes care of the Mac partition (Time Machine can only work on HFS+ volumes due to the way it tracks file changes). Winclone backups my Windows partition (it makes a compressed image of your Windows partition that's about half the size of all the data on said partition). Mozy backups all my personal data on both partitions to a remote server (2GB is free, unlimited is $5 US/month).

With the 3 above programs it would take an apocalypse for me to lose all my data. Unfortunately you can't use a program like Acronis True Image to backup the entire drive like you can with PCs because Macs use a GUID to store the partition data instead of a MBR.

ZackSchilling

Once you make a Winclone image of the Windows partition, it's easy to restore. On a fresh machine, just open Bootcamp setup assistant and have it create a Windows partition as large as or larger than the one you made the image from. Say you'll install later. Then open Winclone, pick the image and pick the bootcamp partition. If the new partition is larger than it was before, the image will expand to fit.

You can even use this method to expand your Windows partition without disrupting Mac OS at all. Simply backup with Winclone, use bootcamp setup to delete the Windows partition, make a larger bootcamp partition than before, then restore.

mts

this is good to know.

Luq

If you want online backup as well I'd definitely recommend JungleDisk over Mozy.