Backing up Windows 7 partition

[ZackH]

I think I may have done something silly.

I am currently running a virtualized windows 7 environment within my Mac OS X. I wanted to backup both my files from Mac and Windows so I went out and purchased an external backup drive for my Mac thinking that using Time Machine, it will backup all files from Mac and Virtual Win7. I'm beginning to feel I made the wrong purchase. Is this a correct assessment?

If so, how do other more intelligent human beings backup their mac files and win files using parallels?

Thanks in advnace.
ZackH.

 

[Chri12345]

I think Time Machine sees your windows files as one giant file, because it is in fact one gigantic file that contains your entire Windows system. So when you back up, it will always copy that entire virtual disk, and also whatever Mac files have changed. For best results, run Time Machine with Parallels shut down, so that the Windows file system will be consistent on disk.

If there's some nice way to back up the Windows files with Time Machine, incrementally -- like it does for Apple Files -- I don't know about it. In any event, I don't see how Time Machine can do anything intelligent about the files that Windows has open at the moment (such as the Registry); so you would still have to shut down Windows for it to get a proper snapshot.

 

[Kathleen R]

trouble backing up bootcampWin7 (used as VM)

I installed Win 7 & Outlook 2007 in Bootcamp along with co software that requires Windows (& their tech support is dyed in the wool windows so they say it won't run on a mac. So I figured it would be safest to install it in bootcamp (which Microsoft store personnel who set it up & installed said is just like running on a pc).

I got a new Seagate FreeAget GoFlex ultra-portable 500GB drive that came formatted as ntfs with a driver that would allow Macs to write to it. It has backup software that could be used or drag & drop back up. But Time machine wouldn't work.

As I was trying to figure out how to handle this I wondered about partitioning the drive for Windows or what but ended up deciding to just have the Apple store (on a One to One appt) reformat the drive to Mac journaled & show me how to use Time machine. That is taken care of & working nicely.

I also have my old ntfs drive that I used on my Dell. I spent time doing drag & drop back up of my old Dell & deleting the much large incremental back up to free up space. Windows7 has backup software included. It says if there is enough space it will do both a regular back up & a mirror backup that could be used to restore the whole thing.

I wasn't able to do the regular backup since it had trouble finding some of the libraries or something about that. I concluded that it is because it sees mac files on the windows side, I guess because they are shared. So couldn't figure out how to get around it,but I was able to do the mirror backup which is apparently a mirror image of the whole thing from which is could be restored.

I think that Parallels or related co offers some sort of backup software. I just saw some mention of it, don't know about it.

It may be a bit late now, but I think one option might be to partition the drive. 1 place I saw discussion of this which you might find helpful was on amazon.com. Look up the drive or other ones if it doesn't have a lot of reviews (I saw a bunch for the Seagate Free Agent GoFlex ones). As I recall, there were a # of people who were either running bootcamp with Windows on a mac or maybe parallels or other VM that discussed this. Some of the reviews are lame, like I like this drive because it backs up all my stuff (duh, that's what they all are supposed to do) but others seemed to show a lot of knowledge & understanding. Other tech sites that review HDs might also have info, but Amazon seemed to have a lot with etensive info.