Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
you could restore it onto a hard drive that then would be. Sometimes,
Windows imaging utilities can create incrementally versioned images,
such that you can restore your entire disk (although not necessarily
individual files) to various past states, without requiring multiple
complete copies of the whole disk. Imaging software may let you store
a single backup on another disk in such a way that you can boot from
that disk if you connect it to the same computer, but unlike in Mac
OS X, a disk that can boot up one PC can't automatically boot
another—some imaging utilities can make this happen, some can't.
In short, to make the nearest equivalent of a bootable duplicate under
Windows, you should look for an imaging utility—and be prepared to
dedicate a separate external hard drive, or at the very least a separate
partition—to storing those images. Examples of Windows imaging
software include these:
•
Casper
($49.95)
•
DriveImage XML
(free)
•
Windows Backup (built into Windows 7 and later, but has far fewer
features than the others, and always requires an NTFS-formatted
destination volume)
I no longer use Boot Camp on a regular basis (virtualization meets
my needs better), and even if I did, my usage would be so light and
infrequent that imaging my disk wouldn't be worth the time and
bother. So, I haven't used any of these programs extensively enough
to have much of an opinion other than to say I'd start with a free choice
and go from there. However, I do think some variety of versioned
backups is a good idea, and I turn to that topic next.
Create Versioned Backups of a Boot Camp Volume
If you want to make versioned backups of some or all of your Windows
files, you can do so either from Mac OS X—after a reboot, naturally—or
from within Windows.
