How Do I? XP, Win 7, Data Drives, Backup Friendly

I'm working on setting up Parallels and Windows on my new Mac Pro. (I've previously been using Windows on a dedicated computer.) Here are my goals:

- A drive for Windows XP
- A drive for Windows 7
- A drive for Data (accessible by both OSs)
- Backup friendly (backup only changed files, not hundreds of gigabyte drive images)
- Bonus: Take advantage of RAID

My computer has 4 hard drives in it. 2 1 TB drives and 2 500 MB drives. I have the two 500 MB drives set up as a striped array for Mac OS and it's data. I'm using half the space of the 2 1 TB drives as a nightly bootable copy of the main volume. I also have an attached RAID 5 array (hardware RAID) that I want to put a partition on for the Windows data for best performance.

Backups are being done nightly using Retrospect to a tape drive. I want to make sure Retrospect has access to the individual files for the backup so that it's not backing up 2-300 GB of data just because even a single file changed.

I would love to set up the 2 1 TB drives as three RAID 0 partitions. 1 for the online backup and the other two for boot camp style drives for XP and Windows 7. I've figured out how to create partitioned RAID 0 configurations for this drive, just not with partitions usable as Windows drives.

So far, I'm not having a lot of luck figuring this out. I wanted to set up Boot Camp partitions, but BC apparently only configures one partition for any one physical internal hard drive. This rules out multiple partitions and the use of RAID. I see that there's an NTFS driver available that theoretically might let me do what I want, but I'm not sure how this would work with Parallels.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to do this?

Thanks.

 

So far I've been testing Paragon NTFS, but Parallels just creates a virtual drive on an NTFS formatted drive. (Why can't Parallels treat it as what it is?)

I've created a Boot Camp partition, figuring I could possibly clone it, then update the copy to Windows 7, and hopefully have my two OS drives. (I don't really need, or want, to boot my Mac solely into Windows.) But so far I've found that WinClone is gone. (Other threads here suggest that it would have done the job.) I also tried Paragon Disk Copy for Mac which suggested it could do the same thing. But it requires burning a CD and booting from it, which boots into Windows. I can make an archive copy, but only to another NTFS drive. That was a waste of $30.

Any suggestions? Please?!?

 

I finally found an answer after much searching and testing. It turns out that Retrospect can back up Parallels virtual machines by treating them as regular clients. The trick is to install Retrospect Client in the guest OS and have it back up the virtual drives that way. Of course, the hard drive image also needs to be excluded from Retrospect's Mac backup.

This means I can just use Parallels' virtual drives to set up my three drives (Windows XP, Windows 7, Data) on existing Mac OS RAID partitions and accomplish all my goals.

 

Hello, I have been looking to move to an iMac with W7 in a VM using Parallels and was searching for similar information on backing up the Windows VM. Based on your last post, it seems you purchased Retrospect for Windows and installed it to the Windows VM, is that right? How has it been working? Do you do any backing up to the hard drives? If so, how do you set them up to accept NTFS files -- do you create a partition?

thanks in advance.

John-Michael

 

Actually, I'm using Retrospect for the Mac. (The single server, 20 client version, though I suspect the 3 user version would work for just a single Mac plus a VM.) I've been using Retrospect for more than15 years, so it was a relief to find that there was a solution with it.

(A note for those who haven't used Retrospect before: It is a very powerful product, and it can take quite a while to understand its concepts, and somewhat frustrating until you do.)

I haven't gotten backups for the VMs implemented yet. Getting the VM up and running is a much lower priority than billable work and dealing with other configuration changes. I did figure out that I can have Retrospect back up everything but the actual hard disk image by modifying a Retrospect rule to exclude files which "contains .hdd." AND "ends with .hds". This way Retrospect backs up all the VM configuration files of the .hdd package, while leaving the Windows files to be backed up by the Client.

I'm planning to start backing up the VM via the Retrospect Client late next week. I can let you know how it goes then.

I'm not currently backing up the image files to other hard drives. I'm planning to make a copy of each VM package intended as a starting point for recovery soon which will reside on another drive, but that's about it. The bulk of the backups will be covered by Retrospect tapes.

One final note: I back up everything, including applications. I learned a long time ago that if you back up your data, but not your applications and system, it can take days (or worse) to get everything up and running again. If you back up everything, then it's far simpler to get back into action when something happens.

 

Thanks for your reply, and yes, the learning curve (as all of this is new territory) is large. I would very much like to hear how it goes when you get started. I want to be able to backup and restore files of any kind, individually.