Best way to back up lion partition and windows using bootcamp and parallels

I am using this software to do backups (copycatx):

http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=20 2&products_id=7&zenid=4c9aee5c1e7a1f92985f71f82cacbbb0

Their support is excellent and they always answered my questions very quickly, within hours or hour.

What I usually do is I do a full backup, i.e. I clone the entire disk (that is both partitions bootcamp & osx) to an external hdd.

For me it is important to get back to work as quickly as possible. If my current hdd would crash I simply swap the hard-drives and I am back and running immediately.

Now, what I did was, I installed OSX on a thumb drive, I also put copycatx on the thumbdrive. I boot-up using the thumb drive osx, start copycatx, select the clone options and leave the backup running overnight. I also have two backup drives, if something goes wrong with one I always have the other one. I do the backups alternatively on each of the drives.

I should also mention that I usually run win 7 natively not through parallels.

I also suggest that you use a software like dropbox to save your important files remotely. If encryption is important to you, there is free software out there like truecrypt or you can go commercial.

I've seen other people using carbon copy cloner or winclone. They might work as well. You might want to look at Acronis true image for backups under windows 7. I never used timemachine. I heard that it doesn't backup bootcamp native windows partitions.

This is perhaps not exactly the solution you want if you want to do it wirelessly.

I think the bottom line is this. You need to figure out what is important to you in case your hard-drive crashes or some other disaster occurs? Do you want to get back running very quickly? Can you tolerate a bigger downtime? Do you want your files to be backed-up near real-time?

Depending on the answers to these question I think you can find a solution.

"Backup extremely impt to me. Hate physically connecting external HD to pc now to backup, although memeo works great."

I have to agree it can be a pain to go through backing up to an external HDD. However it is a much greater pain to not have a backup when needed. If you are really concerned you might consider two separate backups for each OS as Mr. Murphy can appear at any time and ruin your day and night.

In addition to CopyCatX here are some other Boot Camp Windows backup applications that have been used by participants on this forum. Acronis does not work with Boot Camp. Do a search for details.

Winclone

Clonezilla

Casper 6

Paragon HD Manager 2011

I can attest to Paragon's HD anager 2011. It works great to make an image of the Boot Camp partition. But to do this correctly, you need to boot into their recovery disk (Linux/WinPE) and run the backup utility there. I had a bunch of 250 GB frives lying around from an old server install. I used one of them plugged into a USB external caddy to back up the Boot Camp partition. HDM 2001 compresses the backup to abput 1/2 the size of the Boot Camp installation.

Paragon also recognizes HFS+, so you won't get caught accidentally overwriting your OS X partition because the backuop utility failed to recogmize it and laceled it unallocated.