Are there any alternatives to Winclone?

[ECD]

Now that I am running Lion and Winclone no longer works...
I tried Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2011 Suite, ....

I submitted a question a week ago to Paragon Sales asking if they offered any product that works with OS X LION and that would allow me to backup and restore my Win 7 OS to my bootcamp partition. Their response was:

Thank you for your request and your interest in our software solutions.

I'm really sorry, but we do not offer such a product yet, that meets your requirements.

Thank you for your understanding.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have further question.

Yours sincerely,
Reina Castaneda Meneses
Sales Department
Paragon Software Group​

 

[MJL]

I did something long time ago with Windows 98 and NT 4.0 and in theory it should work.

I have not got the time to test this. (downtime has already been rather long).

Two windows utilities are required: diskpart and robocopy and you need to be able to boot Windows 7 externally.

There is documentation on the web how to make a bootable Windows USB drive. (You can also use the windows install dvd.) Find the bootable USB stuff, it gives an example of the diskpart commands.

If the partition is corrupted then I suggest you use diskpart to reformat the drive (you can also use the windows install DVD and use the custom install to format the boot camp partition).

Then use robocopy to copy all the files back. (restore)

To make a backup - also boot from external DVD/USB and use robocopy to transfer your partition data to another HDD formated in NTFS, you can use a folder. Make sure to copy all the hidden and relevant stuff, I normally do : robocopy <source> <destination> /R:3 /W:3 /MIR /NP /XD recycle.bin
<source> can be C:
<destination> can be D: or D:\C_Backup

You'll have to look up all the commands. Only thing is that this will not compress your data but it is rather fast.

One other thing as well: NTFS assigns security. I normally use fat32format (search on the web for it) to create a large FAT32 partition and then I use the Windows 7 command "convert <destination> /fs:ntfs /NoSecurity /quick" to get an NTFS partition that can be read on other installs too. (have had it in the past that I restored and could not read the NTFS partition that held my data....gr....)

 

[MJL]

This will not help the folks who have already been bitten in some way by Winclone but it could be THE silver bullet for the boot camp conundrum. The answer is Paragon Software-- who support folks who have lots of servers in the PC world. http://www.paragon-software.com/home/brh/features.html

I spoke with Tech Support-- their software must be installed in bootcamp and the backup image must be to an external NTFS drive (bus-powered USB is fine). Once the backup of the ENTIRE drive is done you can use it on a new non-formatted drive (as in case of a HD failure).

I will be testing this, and encourage others to do the same-- if you look around their site you will find several free downloads.

I've got Paragon Partition Manager 11 and created the recovery disk. When booting from the recovery CD it would not see my newly installed (and up and running) Intel X25M 80 Gb SSD.

When Paragon is started from within Windows 7 it does see the SSD.

As mentioned earlier I tried to delete on an external HDD the OS X partition and it deleted the internal one instead.

edit: Just noticed that in one part of Paragon it mentions that it is an NTFS partition and in another part that it is FAT16.

All in all I have not much confidence in this product any longer (was fine on a true PC with BIOS). Tread very carefull here.

 

[dimme]

All in all I have not much confidence in this product any longer (was fine on a true PC with BIOS). Tread very carefull here.

I think the problem with the Windows backup software is they do not handle the EFI bios correctly. I use true image on my PC and it is great but on my MacPro it's a no go. Same for the Pargon hard disk recovery suite.

 

[MJL]

I think the problem with the Windows backup software is they do not handle the EFI bios correctly. I use true image on my PC and it is great but on my MacPro it's a no go. Same for the Pargon hard disk recovery suite.

I've used Acronis True Image for many years after switching from Partition Magic Disk Image when it was sold to Norton and Norton screwed it up. (I think last time I used PDI was under Windows 2000). True Image never missed a beat but unfortunately does not work with EFI. However Intel is phasing out BIOS in favour of EFI so it will be an issue we'll see increasingly. (and it is not an Apple issue only). Windows 7 itself happily boots into EFI and installs onto an EFI machine. It is just that the built in windows backup at times won't recognise the backup location but I rather have that than having trouble with the restore (when time is of the essence).

 

[dimme]

I just had problem with my boot camp drive and I needed to move it to another drive. I tried clonzilla but it had a problem because the original windows install was on a drive with a OS X partitions and Windows. Then I tried true image 2010 still a no go. I had backed up the drive in windows so I inserted the windows disk when the recovery console comes up I point it to the files and it errors out. At this point I gave up and started to reinstall windows for some reason after the install the system reserved partition was also mounting on the mac desktop. That's annoying! Then I remembered I had a winclone backup from a few months ago. I tried it with Lion and still a no go. I have a external drive with snow leopard on it booted from that and 20 minutes later I was back up.
So I guess I will be keeping winclone and snow leopard around for my windows backup solution.