I have been trying for a long time to find a good backup solution for my Boot Camp partition. If I use NTFS, it is read-only on the Mac side and although Retrospect for Mac can back it up, it cannot restore it. Retrospect for Windows should work, but is expensive. I have had good luck with Acronis for backup of Windows systems, and tried to use it in Boot Camp. It sees the Boot Camp partition as an unsupported dynamic drive and refuses to back it up. Acronis does run just fine in Parallels, and will happily back up any Parallels boot drive that I have tried it on. That includes the Boot Camp partition. If you want to try it, you can download a two week free trial version of Acronis and see for yourself. It does cost money to keep using it, but a lot less than Retrospect. One nice feature of Acronis is that if you back up to DVD, you can keep adding incrementally to the DVD when you want to capture changes in your system. Acronis works well for backing up Linux systems on a real PC. Just boot from an Acronis CD and snapshot the Linux boot drive. I have not yet figured out a good way to use it for backing up a Parallels Linux system. If anyone has done that, please post the recipe. There is probably some obvious trick that I am missing.
