backup

Carbon Copy Cloner

 

For an image, use CCC (above) or Super Duper.

 

Yes, as the VM is located inside your Home directory (Macintosh HD / Users / YOU /) and is just a file like any other for CCC.

 

Yes, but not BootCamp if you use that.

 

Time Machine is awesome and comes free with your mac! Just grab a drive that has enough to back up your system, plug it in and start backing up!

 

CCC can back up the contents of the Boot Camp partition, but it cannot make a bootable clone of the partition.

 

Have you done this before?

 

No, I don't use Boot Camp. Why?

 

Because as far as I have experienced, CCC doesn't backup from NTFS or FAT32 sources, though it can clone to an exFAT volume.

 

I'm just going by this: Can CCC back up my BootCamp (Windows) partition?

This may also help: Backing up to/from network volumes and other non-HFS volumes
Apparently it may have some limitations. On that page, see "Backing up the contents of an NTFS volume".

 

Ah, thanks. I guess the BC partition is always a special place for elves and Mac OS X software.

 

Therefore, it will not clone the partition to a new drive.

 

It can backup/restore user files successfully. It just can't be used to restore the Windows OS.

 

Yeah, but the point of cloning is to have a complete, bootable backup - CCC can't do that with BC.

 

I agree. I guess I missed where the OP expressed a requirement that the backup be bootable.