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tal1971 Author

Level 2

302 points

Thinking of moving to iMac from PC, got a few questions

I'm thinking of moving to an iMac for my next computer, probably in the next 6 months or so, but I have a few questions I wondered if you might be able to help me with.

I'm planning on getting Parrallels Desktop and installing Windows. Now I know Time Machine takes backups every hour. But I was wondering if it will also backup not only the Mac side but the Windows side too.

For example, if I install a program on the Mac side, edit a file, delete a file etc, Time Machine will backup the changes on its next backup. If I done the same while running Windows, i.e install a program on the Windows side, edit a file, delete a file etc, does Time Machine backup these changes for the Windows side too.

Presently for my backing up purposes. I have a hard drive caddie which has a esata connection as well as a USB connection. I have a 3.5 inch 1 TB sata drive that slides in and out of my caddie by way of (for want of a better word) a cradle. I'm planning on getting a 3.5 inch 2 TB sata drive and an additional cradle so that I can have a large collection of backups.

Now with the hard drive caddie I've mentioned above, to use it on an iMac, I would only be able to connect it via USB. My fear with this is that it will be a lot slower at taking backups to what I am currently used to seeing when I have it connected to my PC via esata.

I thought about this and noticed the LaCie eSATA Hub Thunderbolt Series on the Apple website http://store.apple.com/uk/product/H8875ZM/A/lacie-esata-hub-thunderbolt-series?f node=5f&fs=m.tsConnections%3Desata

From what I can gather, it would allow me to connect my current esata caddie up to it and it would increase the performance of it to Thunderbolt performance and also would allow me to make use of my current hard drive in the process. I was wondering if anyone has used this hub and if so, is the performance significantly improved. I thought that Thunderbolt would be a good and extremely fast way of taking backups. I will point out that I find that the taking backups every hour with Time Machine, for me would be a bit of an overkill, so I'm planning on just switching Time Machine off when I don't need it to take backups, and then switching it back on when I want it to take a backup. Doing this could result in larger backups than if I had it doing it hourly, so again I thought something that would give me Thunderbolt performance would be good for this scenario.

Any help and advice would be appreciated. 🙂

Windows Vista, iPad (3rd Gen) 32GB iPhone 4S 32GB

Posted on Aug 27, 2012 8:29 AM

34 replies

tal1971 Author

Level 2

302 points

Aug 28, 2012 8:55 AM in response to tal1971

Thanks every one for the help received so far it's much appreciated.

Now that I have had some suggestions/help with backing up etc. It got me thinking about how I would backup the Windows side that I plan to install through Parrellels Desktop. From what I can gather, it isn't going to be easy or perhaps possible to have Time Machine backup EVERYTHING, by everything I mean the Mac side as well as the Windows side. Presently on my Windows pc, I use Acronis True Inage. I've used this for around 5 years and it's saved my neck many many times.

Now I was wondering, if once I'd installed Parrallels Desktop and Windows. Would it be possible to install Acronis True Image, then take a full backup with it. Would doing this full backup, backup EVERYTHING including the Windows side as well as the Mac side. And from there, if I were to restore off a backup I had taken, would the restore, restore both the Windows side and the Mac side.

Basically in a worst case scenario if my iMac had got messed up and would not boot up.

How do I go about getting not only the Mac side restored to an earlier and working state, but the Windows side too. It's just I know that at some point in time, I would need to do this has I've needed to do it in Windows several times in the last 5 years with Acronis True Image.

Thanks again everyone.

tal1971 Author

Level 2

302 points

Aug 30, 2012 12:43 PM in response to tal1971

Bring up the above post.

RRFS

Level 5

4,522 points

Aug 30, 2012 1:50 PM in response to tal1971

We all know about assumptions but I'll go out on a limb here and say the ATI program will backup the windows info but not the Mac, but it may not back up either one due to disk format. How about just using a USB thumb drive and copying your Windows file data to the drive as a backup?

Csound1

Level 9

59,973 points

Aug 30, 2012 1:53 PM in response to Community User

doug3684 wrote:

I have the same question regarding Windows backup in Time Machine

I installed WindowsXP last week and (long story) I corrupted it. I could not retrieve it on Time Machine so I re-installed it. Has been a few days now and so far Time Machine does not seem to work for WindowsXP

But who knows? it might work on Windows 7

D

How did you install Windows, BootCamp or in a VM?

tal1971 Author

Level 2

302 points

Aug 30, 2012 3:03 PM in response to RRFS

RRFS wrote:

We all know about assumptions but I'll go out on a limb here and say the ATI program will backup the windows info but not the Mac, but it may not back up either one due to disk format. How about just using a USB thumb drive and copying your Windows file data to the drive as a backup?

Thanks for the help.

Re using a usb thumb drive and copying Windows file data to the drive as a backup. Currently on my Windows machine now I have upwards of 200gb of stuff on it. If I have the same or even half of this data on the Parrellels desktop/Windows side when i get an iMac, then this will be way too big to fit on a usb thumb drive.

RRFS

Level 5

4,522 points

Aug 30, 2012 3:16 PM in response to tal1971

Agreed. There are other drive options, Firewire 800 or ThunderBolt, FW being less expensive. You may have to run Bootcamp for the appropriate drivers though.

Sep 1, 2012 9:04 AM in response to Csound1

To install WindowsXP I have used the Bootcamp method but I haven't put the drivers in yet. Still looking out for a copy of Snow Leopard, so that might make a difference

tal1971 Author

Level 2

302 points

Sep 2, 2012 12:45 AM in response to tal1971

I've found out a lot in the past few days and really appreciate the help I've recieved so far.

Probably the easiest thing I've realised re having a bootup/startup/install disk, is to use a 16GB USB thumb drive that I have, and use Lion Disk Maker to make the USB thumb drive into a bootup/startup/install device. That is once I had downloaded the Mountain Lion Installer.

Thanks again.

tal1971 Author

Level 2

302 points

Sep 2, 2012 1:01 AM in response to tal1971

For backing up:

Well I'm a bit undecided.

I really like the sound of Time Machine with its simplicity and with it been part of the OS. But I'm unsure has to if and how it would backup the virtual machine/Parrellels Desktop/Windows side of the iMac.

Unless I'm wrong, I would assume that when I would install Parrellels Desktop and Windows, I would need to create a partition on my hard drive to install it on, for example, the iMac I would get would have a 1TB hard drive in it, I would probably partition it 500GB for the Mac side and 500GB for the virtual machine/Parrellels Desktop/Windows side. But I'm unsure as to if Time Machine would backup both the Mac side and the virtual machine/ParrellelsDesktop/Windows side. And if it would backup both sides, would it be possible to restore either the Mac side, virtual machine/Parrellels Desktop/Windows side independantly, for example. If the Mac side was fine, but I was having problems with the virtual machine/Parrellels Desktop/Windows side, could I just restore the virtual machine/ParrellelsDesktop/Windows side and leave the Mac side untouched and vice versa.

Other backup options I've looked at are the Carbon Copy Cloner.

This seems really good too. From what I've read it can now be sceduled to take backups. With Carbon Copy Cloner, it is possible to create a bootable version of your system. So for example, if my iMac would not load up at all, I could use the external hard drive (I would be using for backups) to then boot off and from there I assume that I could restore my iMac with this same Carbon Copy backup.

Csound1

Level 9

59,973 points

Sep 2, 2012 5:05 AM in response to tal1971

tal1971 wrote:

For backing up:

Well I'm a bit undecided.

I really like the sound of Time Machine with its simplicity and with it been part of the OS. But I'm unsure has to if and how it would backup the virtual machine/Parrellels Desktop/Windows side of the iMac.

Unless I'm wrong, I would assume that when I would install Parrellels Desktop and Windows, I would need to create a partition on my hard drive to install it on, for example, the iMac I would get would have a 1TB hard drive in it,

snip

Yes, you are wrong, no partition is needed to install Windows in a Virtual Machine.

dwb

Level 7

32,920 points

Sep 2, 2012 5:31 AM in response to tal1971

if you intend to use Parallels Desktop you won't need to partition the hard drive - and if you did decide to use BootCamp which does require a partition CarbonCopyCloner wouldn't back up the BootCamp partition.

Assuming you stick with Parallels Desktop you could use CCC to backup the entire computer - Mac and Windows virtual drive. CCC is a very good program, one that has been part of my arsenal at work for quite a few years. But I don't use a clone as my sole backup solution for the simple fact that the resulting clone and the source are mirror images. But what if I deleted a file I later wanted? The clone won't have it. TimeMachine has a much better chance of letting me find files I accidentally deleted because it performs incremental backups.

Csound1

Level 9

59,973 points

Sep 2, 2012 5:57 AM in response to dwb

dwb wrote:

if you intend to use Parallels Desktop you won't need to partition the hard drive - and if you did decide to use BootCamp which does require a partition CarbonCopyCloner wouldn't back up the BootCamp partition.

Assuming you stick with Parallels Desktop you could use CCC to backup the entire computer - Mac and Windows virtual drive. CCC is a very good program, one that has been part of my arsenal at work for quite a few years. But I don't use a clone as my sole backup solution for the simple fact that the resulting clone and the source are mirror images. But what if I deleted a file I later wanted? The clone won't have it. TimeMachine has a much better chance of letting me find files I accidentally deleted because it performs incremental backups.

Use CCC and TM (or similar) neither constitutes a proper backup, one is a snapshot and the other need all day to get going again, together is another story.

dwb

Level 7

32,920 points

Sep 2, 2012 6:05 AM in response to Csound1

You did note that I said, "But I don't use a clone as my sole backup solution ..." right? I didn't expand on that because the OP has enough on his plate already.

Csound1

Level 9

59,973 points

Sep 2, 2012 6:08 AM in response to dwb

Yes I did, but I thought it needed reinforcement

tal1971 Author

Level 2

302 points

Sep 3, 2012 12:23 AM in response to Csound1

Re:

'Yes, you are wrong, no partition is needed to install Windows in a Virtual Machine'

Thanks very much for clarifying this.

I think where I was getting confused, was, a while back I was in an Apple Store, the sales assistant that I spoke to, briefly told me about Boot Camp, she basically told me what it was and then went on to show me brielfy on an instore iMac how you set it up/installed Windows, part of what she showed me was, you create a partition. I assumed the same partition creation was required for Parrellels Desktop.

Thanks again.

Thinking of moving to iMac from PC, got a few questions