Backing Up Boot Camp

Backing up your data is a critical aspect of computing. A few years ago, Apple started taking steps to make it easier for people to do this with their Time Machine software. In conjunction with an external hard drive, Time Machine will make a complete backup of your computer and continuously update it so in the event of a crash, Time Machine has a very recent backup to help you restore your data. It works well and is simple, but it doesn’t do everything.

One of the things it does not do is back up Boot Camp Windows partitions. This can be problematic for those of us who spend lots of time setting up and using our Boot Camp partitions — we don’t want to lose them any more than we want to lose our Mac partitions. There are some spendy Windows backup options out there, but we have always used Winclone, a free application that backs up Windows machines.

Freeware can be great — the Mac backup software SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner are fantastic tools we use all the time. There are usually compromises, though. In the case of Winclone, the drawback has been that the backups could not be used to restore a Windows partition. All the data would be saved, but it would have to be manually restored after Windows was installed, which can be a daunting task.

The new version of Winclone, though has resolved this issue. It’s a great way to be able to backup and restore your Windows side as well as your Mac side. You can save the backup as a disk image to your Time Machine drive so it is in the same place as your Mac backup, or if it is small enough, you could even put the image on your Mac side, where it will be preserved in Time Machine with your Mac backup.

Please note: this only applies to people using Boot Camp. People who use Parallels and other programs that create virtual machines do not have to do anything extra to back up their Windows data, since virtual machines are treated like any other file by Time Machine.