One Backup Program For Bootcamp And Mac

One thing I really like about OS X is the ability to use Time Machine and to backup and restore a partition. But now I've started working with Boot Camp and would like to do something similar. I've already tried Macrium Reflect, but could not get it to boot after restoring a test partition.

Most backup errors come from issues that CHKDSK can easily fix, so do this first. I’m not going to get into how to do this, but TwoCanoes has a great tutorial here. Assuming you only have one Boot Camp partition on your Mac, you should only see one BOOTCAMP drive in the column to the left. To upgrade Mac bootcamp drive to new SSD drive without any boot error, it's highly suggested for you to clone the whole SSD boot drive to the new one. The best Mac SSD clone software - EaseUS Todo Backup for Mac allows you to effective clone Mac bootcamp drive and upgrade to new SSD within 3 simple clicks under macOS 10.12 (Sierra) and previous.

I now have an installation of Windows 8.1 Pro on Boot Camp, that is working well for me and I'd like to take a snapshot of it, and be able to restore it as a test. It looks so far like Winclone might be my best answer. But I prefer a Windows only solution if possible. I suspect that since Boot Camp uses OS X to facilitate booting into Windows, a pure Windows solution wouldn't be the best one. I want to start using my new Boot Camp partition with Parallels Desktop.

That way I can have a Windows only environment and a Windows environment under OS X, with the same Windows installation. Parallels Desktop purports to support this scenario. But just in case something goes wrong, it would be crucial to restore my Boot Camp partition back to it's previous state. Best free apps for mac. I spent a lot of time getting my Boot Camp partition working the way I want. I simply want to get back to the previous state if the Boot Camp VM fails. Any recommendations for a good Boot Camp backup and restore utility?

I have spent the past several days evaluating Winclone and the built in Microsoft solution and have arrived at some conclusions. In the process, I had to learn about the PMBR or Pseudo MBR Apple uses in Boot Camp.

First of all, I thought I was able to utilize an entirely Microsoft solution. Windows 8.1 includes 'System Image Backup', which can be found under 'File History' in the Control Panel.

It creates a large VHDX file on an external drive. Each time a new backup is created, this large VHDX file is overwritten. For a while I thought it was working just fine, but it was NOT. I suspect the System Image Backup might work okay outside of the Boot Camp environment, on real Windows hardware. But Boot Camp uses a Hybrid MBR.

Go to and read up on it. Rod Smith has created both the rEFInd and GPT fdisk utilties. The latter includes a command line utility named gdisk, which can run under OS X and Windows, as well as Linux. I discovered the Microsoft included System Image Backup had apparently caused a GPT MBR mismatch.

That is the GPT partition Boot Camp resides on and the emulated MBR partition, reported different sizes and start/end positions on the drive. Things worked for awhile with restored the System Image Backup. But ultimately I lost my HFS+ partition with OS X and lost nearly 2 weeks of changes, because I had NOT run Time Machine for the same 2 weeks.

I had to use the gdisk utility, mentioned above, to diagnose the issue. In fact, I had to completely wipe my hard drive and restore the 2 week old Time Backup to get going again. And Winclone restored my Boot Camp partition.

Fortunately, my Winclone backup was current. I had already purchased Winclone 4.3.1 about a week ago. But I had problems with it. Winclone support allowed me to download a Winclone 4.4 beta that corrected issues with Windows 8.1. Version 4.3.1 restored the Boot Camp partition, but was not bootable. Version 4.4 includes an option for legacy booting.