coxorange wrote:
A bit difficult to test such a software including worst case recovery if you can't dispense with the concerned computer temporarily. And VERY time-consuming!! Hence I asked for personal experiences.
Well, Anyone elses personal experience won't mean much to you unless they have the same setup as you, so asking others for personal experience is as much of a crap shoot for you as doing it yourself. I went through lots of testing several years ago on my first MacBook Pro, but almost none of that testing is valid for my current machine. With the variations in machines, and machine configurations, what works for someone else might not work for you, and what might work for you might not work for someone else. I learned this when I was testing Colnexzilla as a possible backup/cloning tool. It worked fine on my MacBook Pro, but wouldn't work properly for a number of other users.
coxorange wrote:
What do you mean I'm confusing?
I always wrote about the Boot Camp partition.
I agree that what you are asking for seems rather confusing. You talk about backing up your data on your Windows partition, and you talk about performing incremental backups. The WIndows 7 Data backup utility it perfect for tasks like that. It's when you start wanting to perform disk image backups, and then ontop of that perform incremental image backups of your Windows partition that things get challenging and confusing. Since you aren't clear about what scheme you want to use, it is hard to answer with a "clear answer" and not get confused by what you seem to be asking.
coxorange wrote:
As far as I know that's not enough to perform incremental backups including EVERYTHING on the Boot Camp partition.
If you use the Windows 7 data backup and perform incremental backups, you will have a backiup of all your data from the Windows partition. Isn't that want you want? If you want to perform a restore, it will not restore you back to a bootable drive, but it will have all your data and files backed up. If you want to perform a partition backup image, and make those backups incremental nightly, it might be possible. Since you are talking about a Boot Camp partition on a Mac here, you also need to clarify if you want this backup to run when teh system is booted into Windows, or when teh system is runnign MacOS, or ifit is acceptable to boot from yet another media for the backup purposes.
At this time, I'm not sure that any software exists which can make backup image of your Boot Camp/Windows partition when runnign MacOS that will make a backup image that cna restore to a bootable volume and can do incremental backups. There are few, if any backup tools that will run runder native Windows on your Boot Camp partition that will make an image file backup that can do incremental backups, and also allow you to restore to a bootable partition. I beleive that the Paragon software is one of the very few that can do this. I have tried and successfully made backupns and restores from backup disk images using custom boot drives for CloneZilla, and the Paragon Drive Backup tool. I don't believe that CloneZilla will do inremental backups, and I'm not sure about the Paragon software as I stopped using Boot Camp about 1.5 years ago when I upgraded to my current MacBook Pro. Now with this system, I don't run native Windows, I only run it virtualized using Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion. For both of those, I get a full system backup with each MacOS backup I take, since the Windows File System is virtualized and stored entirely in files on my MacOS partition.
