Backing up a dual-boot

September 29, 2012 6:53 PM

Does anyone have any suggestions for backing up a macbook pro that is running lion on the mac partition and windows 7 on the bootcamp partition? I have an external hard drive that time machine backs up to for the macintosh paritition, and I use acronis true image to do the pc portion of the backups. I guess what I want to know is am I doing this inefficiently or is there a better way to back up everything? I am not sure that I understand how backups work that well nor whether cloning my hard drive would be a better solution? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
posted by nidora to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I think you are doing it exactly the right way. You could potentially look at a solution which clones your PC Bootcamp portion so you don't have to boot up into it and run acronis but when you look at a solution like that then your recovery, should it be needed becomes problematical and you will lose the ability to restore discrete files, require possibly advanced support if restoring the partition to a different drive and well ... it potentially creates more issues then it would solve timewise. So in my opinion you are doing it exactly the right way.
posted by Podkayne of Pasadena at 7:08 PM on September 29, 2012

If you want to backup your Windows partition while booted into OS X, you could take a look at Winclone. But what you're doing now is fine too. Is there any particular reason you're worried?
posted by vasi at 3:07 AM on September 30, 2012

Response by poster: One of my questions is there a way to clone my entire hard drive the one with windows 7 on it (bootcamp) and the Mac OS Lion? I'm just not sure that I understand how having two different backups is a more elegant solution than somehow cloning my entire hard drive using one program? Any thoughts?
posted by nidora at 9:55 AM on October 2, 2012

Best answer: When you clone your hard drive you will have to restore the entire hard drive, a process which could potentially take hours, to restore just one single file that you might have erased or lost. You'll then need an additional hard drive on which to restore it all up even in the case of one single file. Your current back-up strategy allows you to do discrete file restores.
posted by Podkayne of Pasadena at 2:17 PM on October 2, 2012 [1 favorite]