anonymous4a wrote:
ok i wasn't clear,
That would have helped. 😝
I want to make a backup of my windows partition and mac partition on my macbook pro retina on to ONE external hard drive.
Ok, so you have OS X and Windows in BootCamp on your Retina MBP.
You want to make a backup of both to one drive and this is what you should do.
Get another powered external drive slightly larger than your internal boot drive.
Use Disk Utility to format this external drive with a GUID partition table and two partitions each slightly larger than your MacintoshHD and BootCamp partitions
The first external partition formatted OS X extended journaled (MacintoshHD2) and the second one exFAT (WindowsBootcamp2) The OS X parittion is first at the top.
Download these two programs, Carbon Copy Cloner and Winclone 3.
Use CCC to clone the OS X MacintoshHD to the MacintoshHD2, and use Winclone 3 (runs in OS X) to backup Windows BootCamp to WindowsBootCamp2.
The OS X clone on the external drive is bootable if you hold the option key down while booting the computer.
The Winclone 3 partition on the external drive is not bootable, it's a backup only as Windows is copy protected and will invalidate itself if it ran.
Warnings:
Don't use CCC to clone BootCamp, it's not designed for that and won't restore to run Windows.
There is no software that can do both parittions at the same time and be bootable or restore properly to a different sized drive or restore the RecoveryHD partition. Some have tried with some other softwares and have problems with lost drive space.
Both partitions have to be cloned/backed up seperatly as there is some intelligence involved and the user needs the option to adjust partition space.
Also, backup your files in Windows (and OS X) to a regular external exFAT drive that was formatted on the oldest Windows machine your going to connect to, OS X doesn't do exFAT correctly so Windows can't read it. The exFAT partition using Winclone likely won't be readable by a Windows PC.
Most commonly used backup methods
.Drives, partitions, formatting w/Mac's + PC's
Again, you can't run Windows from a external drive, it's copy protected and takes the hardware id's into that, so it's essentially worthless to use NTFS on the external WindowsBootcamp2 partition.
All you need is a partition format that can handle over 4GB sized files, and exFAT is ideal and free to use. FAT32 can't handle 4GB+ files and is being phased out.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/review-is-microsofts-new-d ata-sharing-system-a-cross-platform-savior/