Backup routine for iMac with Mac OS X and Boot Camp partition
Hello everyone,
I got the task to come up with a backup routine for four current gen iMacs. The backups are supposed to be bootable and there is a Boot Camp partition that has to be backed up, too. The iMacs are part of a company network, thus, they can probably use some storage on the network drives. Would it be a good idea to use that as the backup folder?
How would you set up a routine like that? Is it even possible to do that without buying additional software? Or do Time Machine and the built-in system image back thingy of Windows suffice?
Thank you so much for your help, I appreciate it!
Comments
For bootable backups, Carbon Copy Cloner is more customizable than TimeMachine, it doesn't cost a lot and you should be able to use one license for all the machines:
https://www.bombich.com
Time Machine has issues with large files because it keeps trying to back them up and version them so people have found that things like virtual machine drives that change every time you open them keep getting backed up and using up space on external drives. The good thing about Time Machine though is that it operates in the background more easily than apps. Having to backup manually gets annoying very quickly. CCC has scheduling that can help automate things and you can get emails when a backup is done.
The backup system in Windows should be ok to use but it's not pleasant to deal with. They always have these crazy option panels to go through and it's harder to do incremental backups:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/windows-7-how-to-perform-an-incremental-back-up/a7d49307-21ec-4658-918d-8528a4b92912
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/50f3ff7a-2ae7-41c1-ac92-41edaed1e2f9/windows7-backup-not-doing-incremental?forum=w7itprogeneral
What would be better is if there was a way to get the files needing to be backed up from the Windows side into the Mac drive so they are backed up in the same process as the Macs. This is easier if you use a virtual machine because you can put files in a shared folder. Natively booted Windows doesn't have write access to the Mac side and it won't always be running in order to hit a backup schedule. There's a 3rd party app you can use for Windows backups though:
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/
The network drive would be ok but will likely be very slow for the first backup. A wireless 802.11g will take a while to backup GBs of data every day, wired ethernet is faster. You can get a portable drive to do backups regularly but it's more manual.
Thank you!