Currently I'm running a dual boot system that was built using the Kalway 10.5.2 disc on one partition and Vista on the other.

The bootloader has never been changed from the one that came with the kalyway disc.

My windows partition has macdrive, and my leopard partition has paragon ntfs...so everything can read and write each other.

Has anyone tried running Acronis True Image 2009 from windows and doing an incremental backup of the whole system...

I would love a nice easy way to backup both partitions and the bootloader, having it always running (like a time machine backup for windows) but have a FULL BACKUP which can restore the whole thing...bootloader and all.

This seems like it would be a good method if Acronis can do it.

I have the older version of Acronis and have the same as you, where partition 1 has Vista Premium and partition 2 has the Mac OSX(Kalyway 10.5.2) . I have backed up the entire hard drive using Acronis True Drive version 11. Since it is a brand new install of both Vista and OSX on a 250GB hard drive, my backup file came out to be only 14Gb in size. The problem I am having right now is that when I try to boot up to the Acronis CD to test if I can restore from my backup if my hard drive is totally unbootable, and then choose the option for 'Acronis True Image' the hard drive works for about 20 seconds or so then stops and I can get a blank screen. I have emailed Acronis Support 2 times for this and they have never replied back. If I can get this to work, then it would be an excellent way for me to backup my install of both Vista and OSX as if they were newly installed. Let me know if you get yours to work. God Bless

You can restore from Acronis Home 11 but you need to do it from within Vista, because it needs Macdrive to see the drive, you have to do a sector by sector backup, or something along those lines, I don't remember exactly. I got a couple of error messages one saying the drive wasn't formatted properly during the backup I ignored that figureing it was because it was formatted hfs+, then to test it I plugged another RAW disk in and did a restore and got one about a sector being unreadable right at the end, played with it for a while everything seemed to work. I formatted with a master boot record and use the Vista boot loader to choose the OS, I'm not sure if that makes a difference or not but I thought it worth mentioning.

Good Luck...JYD

Has anyone been able to make a complete incremental backup, continued to use it, and then use the Acronis Rescue Disk to restore the whole thing? All partitions, bootloader, everything?

I was using Acronis for a long time now. incremental backup is only possible for filesystems it can read. Acronis can backup the hfs partition, however only as a whole (see JYD's post). It sees a single file so to say and has no idea of changes within the osx system.

I just switched to gpt partitioning because I wanted to get my E1505 to be able to at least deep sleep. I got Vista 64 on one and OSX on another partition. Acronis doesn't work with bootable guid partitions (only non bootable). I installed it and it gave me an error message that it won't read dyamic or Z disks . I therefore switched to Norton Ghost (v14). But just like Acronis, Ghost can only backup the entire partition as a whole, no incremental as it does not understand the changes within the hfs system partition. Best way for me at this point is to use incremental from within Vista with Ghost and TimeMachine or super duper from within OSX (note that you can point the diskutility to a time machine backup when you reinstall your OSX after you possible hosed it).
so, at this point there is no imaging/cloning/backup program that does it all - unfortunately

So if Windows is running macdrive shouldn't it work then? If a system file was replaced within Leopard wouldn't it have a different time/date stamp?

macdrive makes the partition transparent for windows. I don't think it's transparent for Acronis however. I think this would require Acronis to read files through macdrive's drivers. if you mounted or copied the osx partition onto an ntfs or fat32 it would work. I'd be surprised if Acronis will read the macdrive partition correctly.

So if I'm reading you correctly, and I understand correctly....it may be able to CREATE the backup (because its running through windows) BUT...and its a big but....it would not be able to RESTORE using the backup...since the Acronis Rescue disc does not understand the apple file system.

I guess we only know for sure if somebody tried

You can backup and restore using Acronis Home 11, but you have to create separate restore files for each operating system, so if you lose Vista you can restore from the rescue disk, if you lose OS X you can restore from within Vista. The incremental backup I have not tried yet, I've only done a full backup and restore, so I can't comment on it, if no one else comments on it I'll try it tonight and see what happens.

That makes sense....so if the hard drive dies...first you restore all partitions (minus leopard)....then once in windows running macdrive, you would create a partition with the mac file system. Then use acronis to restore the leopard partition to that.

Keep us updated on the attempt.

On monday I'm going to call Acronis and see if they have an answer. Now that windows can be put on a Mac it shouldn't be that weird a question for them. No need to state how the mac is being run.

been doing this for over a year now. whenever I hosed my osx, run acronis from within vista and put a working image back to the partition. when vista was hosed as well, run acronis from rescue disk, do the same with vista......

unfortunately, with the advantages I get with gpt partition this is not working anymore with acronis. hopefully soon though. I am pretty impressed with norton ghost v14 at this point. will install macdrive and see if ghost can do an incremental backup of the osx partition. would definitely be cool.

curious what you get with acronis junkyarddiver

The incremental backup said it completed successfully, it's restoring to my drive now, I'll hopefully be replying from OS X in about 10 Min.

Here is the error message I get when I run the backup, I just click Yes
Click to view attachment

Incremental backup worked! I'm typing this from the restored OS X and the 3 updates I installed last night are still there. I did a sector by sector restore to a RAW drive, no partitions, no formatting I let Acronis handle it all.

SWEEEEET.

When you created the initial backup...did you tell it to do the entire drive? Then during the restore tell it do do all BUT MAC? Then I am guessing from within Windows the Mac partition?!?!?

Dude...if that works it seems like it would be as close to a working Incremental Time Machine Backup of a dual boot system that we are going to get.

Deceiver....keep us posted on what you get with Norton using Macdrive.

I initially created 3 separate full backups of each of my partitions, one of XP one of Vista and one of OS X on an external hard drive (OS X needing to be done in sector by sector mode), so if I run a restore I'm just restoring one OS, it doesn't affect any of the other partitions.

Then last night I did an incremental backup of OS X (again in sector by sector mode), it threw that error message at me like it did with the full backup I clicked Yes to continue anyway, it completed the image.

I shut down, switched hard drives (no partitions, no format, RAW space) so I wouldn't mess up OS X if something went wrong, booted back into Vista, chose the date I wanted to restore to (because of the incremental backup there were two), what I wanted to restore (the system partition and the MBR), where to restore it to (the RAW drive) and ran the restore.

Your setup is a little different than mine in that on mine OS X is on it's own physical drive but for the most part it should be the same.

I'm going to have to give it a shot with another harddrive to see if it will do it with partitions. I'll back up the whole thing as one giant file of the whole drive. Then....restore every partition BUT OSX. Then when I'm within Vista try to restore OSX to the remaining space. It should theoretically work. Just trying to make a direct dup of my drive that way. That way.....I can keep having incrementals running...and then if something blows up I can restore the whole damn thing

We will have to wait to see if Norton works on the other test from the Great Deceiver

I am a little confused with "sector by sector" and incremental. It doesn't sound it does incremental when it does sector by sector, which would imply the entire drive or partition...
how large is the second backup? It should only be a fraction of the first one (only changes are backed up).

Actually I missed that myself.

The use of incremental requires macdrive since it looks at the files, not the sectors of the drive. And restoring from within windows would require formatting that partition as well.

How did your test go Deceiver?

I didn't think sector by sector would work either but when I tried to do the backup without it I got an error saying it had to be done that way, then when I got to the part where you choose the type of backup incremental was there so I chose that to see what happens and it went through, and i know it worked because the night before I did the incremental backup I installed 3 updates from Apple that, after running the restore, were still there.

The full backup is 58.4 GB and the incremental is 4 KB they were done 9 days apart and I didn't do much with the system, I do most of my work in Vista.

NYC Coyote, you do not need to partition and format the drive before you run the restore, as I said before I ran the restore on a RAW drive no formatting, no partitions, Acronis handles it all, I went into the Vista disk management utility and deleted the partition from the last test I did just to make sure it wouldn't mess anything up.

very interesting, but still not 100% clear. 4kb sounds very small, but you say you didn't do much with it. If sector by sector then it sounds like it's taking the entire partition as one file and then whatever changed in addition to it, e.g. boot sector? still confused with that, sorry about my ignorance. Shouldn't you be able to open the incremental backup by Acronis and see what's inside the backup? At least that's what I can do with windows backups.
btw. to get a broken system back to run again it depends on how you start. if you keep the same hdd, then you don't need to partition the drive as all the partitions are already set correctly as you say. However, if you start with a new hdd, then you do need to partition and you have to make the partitions at least the same size as the images as NYC Coyote mentions. This can sometimes be painful if you don't get it exact and you end up with empty space between partitions which is difficult to move, expand etc between the two OSs.

also, ghost came to the rescue for the first time when I hosed my OSX. was able to put backed up partition back to drive and with time machine back-up got it to right before the most recent state before it got hosed...
will next try a backup and incremental on my macdrive partition and then do an incremental and see how that works.

edit1: tried to use backup files and folders in ghost on the macdrive. it went through the process until it actually tried to read the files for the backup and gave me an error:
doesn't matter whether I pick one file/folder or the entire system. Not possible in ghost. I can still backup the entire partition though, but only as an image of the entire partition, which means no incremental backups either.

Looks like I'll be installing the latest Acronis and giving this a shot to see if it allows for the backup...hopefully If so, I feel at least, that this is huge.....

Having an incremental backup of both partitions that consistently runs.

Not sure I'll be able to test though until after thanksgiving. Will keep everyone posted though.

Ok...tested with an incremental backup...and sure enough it looks like it works....

restored the mac partition from within Windows after a restoring that partition and using macdrive to create the partition.....

BUT NO GO.

Can't boot OS X