one usb drive to backup Mac and Win ?

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Is anybody backing up both Mac and Win machines to just 1 USB drive? If so, what software are you using, how do you have things hooked up, and what are the shortcomings of your solution?

Here is the approach I am using, but I'm looking for a better one...
Using USB drive on the Win machine formatted as NTFS.
Using Macrium Reflector to backup the Win machines.
Using a sparcebundle and TimeMachine to backup the Mac machines over the network.

The Good:
Can backup and restore any number of machines to 1 usb drive.
Can restore to a point in time.
Can restore individual files/folders.

The Bad:
Can't boot to the backup drive on either Mac or Win.
Backup of the Mac is slow since it must be done over the network, because Mac can't write reliably to NTFS.
Mac backup space is limited to the size of the sparsebundle.
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
Helps if you care to tell us what computers you are using. E.G. if desktops toss a USB2 PCI card in.
 

chscag

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2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
Consider this:

Use Acronis True Image to back up your Windows machine. TI creates a bootable disk with the image on it and can be used from the boot disk to restore the entire image or separate files and folder.

In addition to Time Machine, use either SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to backup and clone your OS X drive. Both create a bootable backup and can be used to restore individual files and folders.
 
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09 MBP 8GB ram 500GB HD OS 10.9 32B iPad 4 32GB iPhone 5 iOs7 2TB TC Apple TV3
Why not keep what you got and pickup another drive that has USB,Firewire and Esata
Connection for speed and boot-ability and partition it according to volume needed. At least
you will be covered for redundant back up and have the ability to locate or store somewhere else for security.
I would also use chscag's options on the second drive.
 
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I have a mix of laptops and desktops to back up - 1 lap and 1 desk Win, and 1 laptop Mac. I'm trying to back all of them up using just 1 drive.

Splitting the backup drive into Win and Mac parts would allow booting into one machine, but would also have the down side of fragmenting free space. At first glance, it seems that it would also allow backing up the Mac via USB, but the price for that would be too high - as it would also forbid me from backing up my Mac over the network.

I used to use Acronis, but found Macrium to be better for some long forgotten reason. I think maybe it was that they demand a higher price for backing up "server" operating systems.
 

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