Make a disk image of a drive with a bootcamp partition?

Question

Forgive me if this is a silly question, but I'm not evern sure what to call what I'm trying to do so I had a hard time finding information on the topic.
I installed Windows 7 on my imac using bootcamp and I love it, everything works great! I spent several days installing everything on both partitions and I'm very happy with the way everything is running. I would like to "clone" or make a disk image of my hard drive. This way if I ever need to reinstall things or have a hard drive issue, I don't have to reinstall everything.
To be clear, I'd like to copy both the windows and mac os partitions together in one step, not make seperate backups.I'm not sure this is even possible.
I backup my files regularly on external drives so I'm not interested in anything that maintains a system of backups or anything like that. I'm looking for something more like a computer lab at a school would use to reformat and and do a fresh install of all of the software easily. Preferably I'd like something free, but I'll pay for something if it makes life easier.
Thank you for the help!

Answer 1

I know it's a lot to absorb (I've been doing these types of things for over 20 years), but if you take it slow, you won't have problem (like restoring over the wrong partition).
The first thing you should do is to create Recovery Media using the Recovery Media Wizard. This will give you a boot CD with all the Paragon tools on it. It your partition or disk goes south, just boot from this disk (hold down 'C' after the gong or hold down Option key and wait until the boot manager appears, then select the Recovery Disk). You cannot restore a image copy to a disk where you're running the OS, so the way to do a restore of a partition (or entire drive) is to boot the recovery disk, point to the partition/disk image, select the partition/disk to recover to, then start the restoral process.
For my Boot Camp partition, I prepared a Backup Capsule following the directions in HDM 2011. Since I have several 250 GB SATA2 drives just lying around from another server installation, I figured it would be best to use a pre-made Backup Capsule. But you can use just old any drive in any format, or even laser media (I wouldn't recommend that unless you want to store your backups offsite).
HDM 2011 can do either offline or online backups, the difference is that with an offline backup, the entire partition (or disk) is unallocated. In an online backup, the backup utility is running against a partition that may be making changes to itself. When you run CCC or SD! in OS X, you're running an online backup. However, I would recommend (at least for the first backup) that you boot from the HDM recovery CD to do an offline backup. This will ensure that you have an *exact* copy of the parition/disk.
Since this is you first time backing up your partition, I would suggest using one of the Backup Wizards. They'll guide you through the backup process and keep you from doing something wrong Similarly, use the Restore Wizard to restore your partition/drive.
To back up a dual-boot Mac to an external USB drive, do:
1) Boot from the Recovery Disk (I'm assuming that the backup hard drive is attached before you reboot)
2) Select Paragon Hard Disk Manager
3) Launch the Backup Wizard by selecting Wizards > Backup Wizard
4) Select the Mac hard disk (not the partition) where it asks "what to backup"
5) On the Backup Destination page, select "Save data to any local drive or a network share"
6) Hit the radio button for the "Save to local drive option" (unless you got a boatload of DVD's )
7) Select the external USB drive as the backup destination
8) Look over and correct the name and comments
9) Hit Next to start the backup
When it's done, you have an entire copy of your Mac's HD saved to external media.
If you need to recover your HD, just run the Recovery Wizard and reverse the process.
I hope this helps to get you started. Good luck.