Incremental Backup of Boot Camp partition without Smartguard

I'm a recent double switcher, from WinXP to an iMac running OSX Lion and Windows 7. I'm trying to make incremental, automatic backups of files on my Boot Camp partition using Time Machine (or Carbon Copy Cloner, haven't decided yet, but below I refer only to TM).

Solutions that I think won't work:

A. Setting Time Machine to back up the entire Boot Camp partition won't work because it backs up the whole enormous file and would fill up my external drive too fast.

B. I can't enable incremental backups using Smartguard and snapshots because I boot Parallels from the Boot Camp partition.

C. Winclone might be part of a different kind of solution (see below), but won't work here because it doesn't do incremental backups.

Am I wrong about any of these? I hope so!



Solutions that might work (in descending order of preference/ease of use), and assume that i would be cloning my Boot Camp partition using Winclone every so often, but incrementally backing up the data files associated with my Windows apps in Time Machine:

D. If I enable sharing of Windows and OS X home folders, will Windows home/user folders (I could have all my Windows apps save their data files in My Documents, for example) appear to Time Machine in the OSX partition? Parallels documentation says that if I config -> sharing -> "share Mac user folders with Windows," these folders will "merge" (p65). But this only makes my Mac folders visible in Windows, but not vice versa (unless I just can't find them which I doubt, because Spotlight can't either . . .) Checking both options for "Share Windows" with Mac has no effect on these folders either, allowing only OSX to view/open folders on the Boot Camp partition (although see E below). Is there a way to make some Windows folders appear to Time Machine, or not?

E. Sharing -> "mount virtual disks to Mac desktop" in Parallels and Finder -> prefs -> general and selecting "connected servers" makes my C: Boot Camp virtual disk appear on my OSX desktop. Can Time Machine select individual folders (lie the one(s) containing my data files for Windows apps) for backup from this virtual disk?

F. I could set my Windows apps to, if possible (some can, some can't), save their data files in the Y:home.psf drive that appears in Parallels. This means their data files are in my OSX user folder and will be backed up by Time machine. The rest I can set to save on a flash drive and/or backup manually.

D, E, and F aren't optimal, but would allow me to 1) partition my external drive to OSX journaling/NTFS with Disk Utility and 2) Time Machine my OSX partition to the former, Winclone my Boot Camp partition occasionally to the latter, and just paste in my Windows data files after recovery. Is it possible to do D? If so, what am I doing wrong? If not, do E and F make sense?

Thanks for reading this far! I didn't mean to go on at length, but I wanted to be as clear as possible. Any help appreciated.

 

I admit that I haven't read all your post, but, to spare you some time, Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner will not backup your Windows files/Bootcamp partition, period, no point in making experiments with that, won't work. And even if they could neither know how to write back to NTFS volumes to restore files.

For incremental backups of Windows partitions/bootcamp look for Windows specific solutions, there's no unique universal solution that can make incremental backups of osx and windows. A windows specific backup solution can use an external, USB connected, drive and work inside Parallels or natively in Bootcamp.

Finally, you shouldn't allow OSX to mess Windows filesystem nor the other way around, neither OSs nor their file systems are made with that possibility in mind.

 

Thanks

As my "none of the above" solution, I used Winclone to backup an image of my virtual machine to a partition on my external drive, and set up another (small) partition as the default location for saving data from most of my Windows apps. Inelegant but effective!

I would be happy to designate Specimen's post as "helpful," but I can't find a way to do it on the forums . . .

 

Does not work is true, cannot work is feeble?

Indeed there does not seem to be any way to get Timemachine to back up the Bootcamp partition. However, it is not clear to me why it can't do this. I have Win 7 installed and running under Parallels Desktop 7. When Win 7 is not running, the Bootcamp partition appears as a Device in Finder. When it is, it appears as a folder in the root(?) folder (or it it home on the Mac). In either condition you can manually copy files out of Bootcamp from the Mac by drag and drop to the Mac desktop, or to external devices, and put them back again. This includes external drives such as a LaCie Mirrored Raid set on Thunderbolt where Timemachine puts my Mac back up. They work afterwards. So you can certainly imagine an app which will do the same after checking for changes to each file to see if it needs to be backed up.

So what am I missing here?

 

You're missing the fact that Windows uses a different file system called NTFS, OS X uses HFS+, Time Machine uses a process to monitor changes to files that depends on the file system being HFS+, so, basically Time Machine as no way of knowing what files changed in the Bootcamp partition and what to backup, also it doesn't know how to write NTFS permissions and other NTFS specific features. The Time Machine app also doesn't know how to restore/write to an NTFS volume. The short answer is, simply. Time Machine doesn't support NTFS volumes, and it likely never will.

 

Thanks Specimen. I don't miss that point, although I can see that Apple might not be very interested in extending the capabilities of Timemachine (although they do want Windows users to buy their Intel Macs ) I am however, well aware of the differences in file systems in different OS, and I routinely write codes to port data and text from one file system to another. I just have not had a Mac very long. Last night I did a few quick experiments with rsync, and backed up parts of both the NTFS and HFS+ partitions onto an external raid array. I admit that the sophisticated behaviour of Timemachine was lacking (although Wikipedia shows an rsync example which claims to mimic Timemachine functionality, and I might make this the basis of something more generic). The most important thing is that my data, docs and source codes on both systems were safe, restorable, and on the same external volume, and if I can do this then it ain't difficult and maybe a professional at parallels should consider doing something much better. There are a lot of posts out there which suggest a demand for a partial solution at least.

 

The problem isn't even backing up, the biggest problem is restoring, a complete restore would require much more than what you are talking about, it's more easy to use a a specific Windows backup solution. Also, I don't think Parallels is in the business of writing backup solutions.

 

Sure, it takes a lot more than I said, but how long is a post? And if not Parallels, maybe someone else. However, in principle, restore is no more difficult than backup except that the Windows files can be copied to any destination except BOOTCAMP from /Volumes/BOOTCAMP using commands from the UNIX shell if Windows is not running or Volumes/C/ if it is. However BOOTCAMP appears as a read only device in the former condition (and I certainly can't change this from the UNIX shell), whereas C appears as a read write device in the latter. So restoring requires Windows to be running as VM, but can still be controlled from the UNIX shell on the Mac. (I just did this with the cp command.) Overall, from the way my machine is behaving the whole problem looks similar to back up/ restore over a network - Windows even treats the Mac disk partition and external drives "belonging" to the Mac as network drives, presumably through the mediation of Parallels itself. So here's a suggestion: someone write a short UNIX script which can be invoked from a small app so that people with no programming skills can use it. It does not have to backup changes every hour, once a day would keep most people safe and happy. rsync will do most of it.

So, it is not a clash of programming acronyms and the ultimate in file format incompatibility which is the impression one gets from the posts here and elsewhere, it's just that there are not enough users to make the construction and support of a relatively simple piece of code economically attractive. Time for open source.

 

Wrong approach, and it's more complex than you think. Parallels writes to the NTFS partition using a MacFUSE derivative that has read and write support for NTFS partitons (OS X comes with read-only NTFS support, that's why you can only read the contents of Bootcamp but not write to it with Parallels closed), and this is where any solution has to start, a reliable NTFS read and write kernel extension (there are some more or less reliable, and some commercial), the second hurdle is correctly supporting the GPT partiton table (more acronyms) and finally a reliable way to monitor changes to the NTFS file system.

Anyway, my recommendation is, get a Windows specific backup solution. I'm not trying to patronize you but in my opinion it's seems so simple to you because you aren't aware of certain aspects, but hey, I'm not here to discuss this, I'm here just to share my opinion from what I know, and since I already did that, I'm done with this thread.

 

I know this is a recurring subject, but can anyone confirm a real life, successful restore?

I am thinking of using the built-in Windows backup solution which has incremental, but I wasn't sure if the rebooting into "Windows Recovery Environment" mode would be a problem for Mac/Parallels/BootCamp. Any first hand experiences?

 

I tried it and I couldn't get it to work. I actually fried my HD boot record and had to restore the entire thing.

My solution is the occasional Winclone image, and sharing the My Documents folders between Windows and Mac. That way Time Machine keeps my data backed up, and I only run Winclone one every couple of weeks after an update or an app install. I've restored Winclone images several times successfully, and I've dug up old files from my Time Machine backup as needed.