Time Machine and Boot Camp - few Q's

[AdamLikesMusic]

Edit - I think I accidentally placed this in the wrong section. Could it please be moved? Thanks, and sorry!

Due to a school project, I've got to install Windows on my MBP. I'm fine with that. My only concern is how Time Machine works with Boot Camp.

Is there some sort of Time Machine interface on the Windows side? Is that entire Windows install automatically backed up? Will programs and documents on my Windows partition be backed up? And just clarifying, in order to move documents to/from each partition, some sort of external storage is needed (thumb drive or the likes)?

Pardon the probably stupid questions, but I'm very unfamiliar with Boot Camp.

Thanks a lot.

(I'm going with Boot Camp rather than a VM as I already own Windows discs, and I'd rather not spend money on the VM software right now)

(I also searched a bit, and failed to find what I was looking for)

 

[devburke]

Time Machine doesn’t work at all with Boot Camp, cuz it relies on the way that OS X keeps track of filesystem changes.

As for moving documents, I don’t use Boot Camp, but I’m pretty sure the Mac partition has read-only access to the Windows partition, and vice versa, so you should be able, for example, when you’re booted into OS X, find the file you want in the Windows partition and copy it over to OS X. Actually, I think you can also set up a shared partition that both OSes can read and write to, but I’m not sure, someone else will have to give you more info on that. But you won’t need a USB drive. Also, you might want to check out Dropbox.

 

[gr8tfly]

Time Machine only works with Mac HFS+ formatted volumes, so you would need a Windows app to do automatic backups (in Windows).

You can manually backup the entire BootCamp partition using WinClone (runs under OS-X). It will create a bootable image file of the partition. I've used it to move and resize my BootCamp Partitions many times with 100% success (i.e., the volume boots to Windows (XP SP3) perfectly). It's donationware (and well worth supporting, IMO).