Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Boot Camp, Virtualization, and Backups
As you'll soon see, some of these procedures are more complex
than others. If you haven't yet installed Windows and you are
contemplating doing so, please consider this advice:
Backing up and restoring files is easier under a virtual machine
than under Boot Camp.
✦
If you are running Boot Camp, backing up and restoring files
is easier if your Windows volume uses the FAT32 format than
if it uses NTFS. However, NTFS is the only format available for
installations of Windows Vista and later.
✦
So, if you have a choice, use virtualization software; if you are using
Boot Camp alone with Windows XP, choose FAT32.
Boot Camp
The Windows partition Boot Camp creates is, as far as Mac OS X is
concerned, just another volume. So most Mac backup software can
read its files easily, and that may lead you to conclude you can simply
back up your Windows partition along with your Mac partition using
your favorite Mac backup program. However, a few issues appear:
•
If you've formatted your Windows volume as NTFS (the only option
for Windows Vista and later), Mac OS X can read from, but not
write to, that volume. This means you can back up your files but
not restore them from within Mac OS X—a potentially significant
problem. (Unfortunately, though you can easily convert a FAT32
volume to NTFS, you can't do the reverse without reformatting your
drive or using special commercial software such as Norton
PartitionMagic.)
One way around this problem is to use Paragon Software's $19.95
NTFS for Mac OS X
, which transparently allows Mac OS X to read
and write NTFS volumes. There's also the free, open-source
NTFS-3G for Mac OS X
and its commercial variant,
Tuxera NTFS
for Mac
(€25), both of which are based on MacFUSE from Google
Code.
