need help with making a image back up of my hard drive

i am new to Mac and i have a Mac book pro 13" i am running parallel and boot camp with windows 7. my question is, i want to make a image of the hard drive to use in case something happens to my main hard drive and i want to simple replace the hard drive and power up and keep going with everything running. any ideas on what software can do that.
your help would be appreciated.
lv

lvargas973 said:

i am new to Mac and i have a Mac book pro 13" i am running parallel and boot camp with windows 7. my question is, i want to make a image of the hard drive to use in case something happens to my main hard drive and i want to simple replace the hard drive and power up and keep going with everything running. any ideas on what software can do that.
your help would be appreciated.
lv

Click to expand...

SuperDuper is free and will perfectly clone your OS X partition. But it won't do your Windows partition. There was a tool called WinClone that has been discontinued and worked really nicely for cloning a Windows partition, but it wasn't updated for OS 10.6 or Windows 7. "Probably" would work fine, but there are no guarantees. I'm not sure where you can even get ahold of it at this point.

I'll do some more digging since I'm curious myself now and will reply later.

There is no software on any platform that I'm aware of that will backup a multiple boot system to another drive and allow you to simply swap drives as if nothing happened.

What has worked for me and has been pretty painless - as in less than 2 hours to be back exactly where I left off with a new drive - I have a dual boot system with Win 7 Ultimate on the BootCamp partition along with XP installed in VMWare.

An external drive - created 3 partitions on mine - one for OS X, one for Windows and one for other data. You would need to consider what you require. this particular external drive of mine include both, 10.5 and a 10.6 bootable clones along with the Winclone partition.

I use SuperDuper! to create a bootable backup.
After re-booting to the OS X backup and making sure it works... boot back to your internal drive.
I then use Winclone to backup the Win 7 partition - make sure the partition you backup Windows to on the external is formatted as NTFS.

(Note: There are some experiencing difficulties with Winclone not restoring. I have not experienced this and have done 3 restores to a new drive in my MBP this year - at that time I believe from 10.6.5.)

(Note: I also use Paragon's NTFS for Mac - don't really know if this is what has enabled mine to work when others haven't).

To restore is exactly the opposite:

Install the new drive
Boot to my OS X backup
Use Disk Utility to partition and format the internal.
Use SuperDuper! to backup the external to the internal.
Boot to the internal and verify it is working.
Open up BootCamp Assistant and create the partition for Windows, then exit out of BCA.
Boot to the OS X external.
Open up Disk Utility and format the BootCamp partition on the internal to NTFS.
Then use Winclone to restore to that partition.

The whole process from the time I begin taking apart the MBP, moving almost 250GB of data (via FW800) onto the new drive, is well under 2 hours. Not bad for restoring a dual boot system.


Winclone is still available on several 3rd party software sites including cnet's download.com.

I have little to add to what Bob posted. Winclone has worked very well for me also (10.6.x and Win7), but there are reports of others having issues and it has been discontinued. If you have anything critical on the Windows partition, best to back it up separately to be sure.

The only other option aside from Winclone would be to simply drag-copy the Boot Camp partition to a dedicated partition on your backup drive. Then to restore…. after restoring your OS X partition, use the Boot Camp assistant to set back up your BC partition, format it in NTFS (you'll need Paragon or Tuxera NTFS commercial…. don't use the open-source version… very slow write speeds), then drag-copy the copy of Windows back over. That should work (recommended here) and is more foolproof, though Winclone is a much more elegant solution.

I have also heard that the Win 7 backup utility works very well, but I have not used it. My Win 7 install basically refuses to see the partitions on this particular external drive except when using the Paragon Mac Browser that was included with NTFS for Mac.

You could also use a CCC or Time Machine or Migration Assistant in lieu of Superduper!.

afaik Winclone does not have the NTFS option

my Winclone does not offer the NTFS option. So how to do it

How to do what? What is it that you're trying to do? And, you don't choose the file system from within WinClone. WinClone can clone a NTFS partition or FAT-32 partition. The problem with cloning FAT-32 partitions is that they can not be shrunk or expanded while NTFS partitions can.

sorry you are right the problem is with Disk utilty who can't create NTFS partition on the external drive as suggested

cedarmoose said:

sorry you are right the problem is with Disk utilty who can't create NTFS partition on the external drive as suggested

Click to expand...

It can if you install Paragon or Tuxera NTFS as suggested.