Question about dual partition backups

Been a reader here for a while but today ran into an issue so decided it was time to create an account and post.

I am running Bootcamp on my Macbook Air and have a 50GB partition on my 256GB drive that has Windows 10 installed. Been using the Mac and Win sides for a while and figured it was time to start doing backups.

Is there a way to do a backup with Time Machine in the Mac OSX to where it backs up the entire hard drive and both partitions at once? Or do I run Time Machine to only back up the Mac partition to a USB drive, then go into Windows and run Backup there and back up that partition on a second USB drive?

I'm thinking I need two USB drives...but was wondering if it's possible to do all of this with Time Machine?

Thanks!

Time Machine won't handle the Windows side of the backup. It is designed to backup drives that are formatted for the Mac. What you could do is use Time Machine to back up the Mac portion of the drive and use WinClone to clone the Windows portion of the drive. If I remember correctly WinClone can store your Windows backup on a Mac drive.

Keep in mind that having your Mac and Windows backups pn the same drive creates a single point of failure. A drive failure could lead to loss of both the Mac and Windows data.

Slydude said:

Keep in mind that having your Mac and Windows backups pn the same drive creates a single point of failure. A drive failure could lead to loss of both the Mac and Windows data.

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Thanks Slydude. I figured it wouldn't be easy as a simple click and backup to get the entire drive save. If I was just running one OS and had a failure, I'd lose all the data anyways. However, since it has to be done in two different manners, I'll just put each on it's own drive. I had though there was backup software available that was designed to copy an entire hard drive's contents regardless of all the OS software platforms that were installed, like Drive Image or something similar.

And further would suggest you use two external drives, one for each operating system. Takes a little longer maybe, with sometimes problems occur with two different formats styles.

I think Winclone would let you store its backup file on the same drive/partition as the Time Machine backup so if you are comfortable with the risk level that's the closest I can think of to the solution you want. I think I ran backups this way for a while with no serious issues but it might be worth an email to Paragon to confirm things.

Windows 10 has an excellent built in backup program that will image your Windows partition and at the same time make a data backup. The only catch is that you must backup to an external drive formatted to NTFS.

chscag said:

Windows 10 has an excellent built in backup program that will image your Windows partition and at the same time make a data backup. The only catch is that you must backup to an external drive formatted to NTFS.

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Sounds like a plan, thanks for the input.

harryb, thanks for the suggestion as well.