Paragon Boot Camp Backup

Discussion in 'Paragon Early Adopter Program' started by Paragon_MA, Oct 8, 2014.

  1. Paragon_MA

    Paragon_MA Paragon Moderator

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    Paragon Software Group proudly announces the beta testing program for our new product, Boot Camp Backup!


    Paragon Boot Camp Backup is the first backup solution for Windows OS resided on Mac computers under OS X. It allows backing up an entire NTFS partition of Boot Camp on a sector-level a simple, user-friendly interface. Feature highlights:


    ∙ Operates on the sector-level - NTFS support and better performance than built-in file-level backup tools
    ∙ Backup to virtual disk - mount created restore point and access stored Boot Camp partition data
    ∙ Incremental imaging to backup only changed sectors to reduce storage disk space usage.
    ∙ Schedule backup to automate backup operations
    ∙ Selective restore to only extact required files and folders from backup image
    ∙ Windows migration - use Windows backup image from one Mac to restore it on anoter

    IMPORTANT! Updated beta of Paragon Boot Camp Backup is released.

    What is new in the update?
    • Pinned archive state. Pin the archive or increment state and be sure that you can always go back to it. This archive will never be changed or merged automatically.
    • Support for Windows installed on separate disk
    • Support for OS X 10.7 Lion added
    • Enhanced restore to another Mac
    • Paragon Updater added
    • Improved Boot Camp detection

    Learn more about the tool on the product page or join in the beta testing now and get your free copy when Boot Camp Backup is officially released!!

    Product page: http://www.paragon-software.com/support/betatesting/boot-camp-backup-beta/
    Look for the download and manual links.

    We’ll be grateful for your feedback. The product is in early beta; your suggestions will help shape its future!

    How to give feedback.
    Post a comment in this thread, or send feedback to beta-test@paragon-software.com.

    When reporting bugs, please provide the logs from Boot Camp Backup. To get logs, launch Boot Camp Backup, click Help > Collect Log Files > Collect Logs. It will generate a .zip. Attach it with your email or make available by cloud storage when making a forum post.
     
    Last edited: Nov 18, 2014
  2. William Dowell

    William Dowell Registered Member

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    I really love the idea of this product. Countless times over the years I've wiped the drive or it's just simply gone wrong etc etc, and though my OS X partition has been safely backed up through Time Machine, I admit that I havent been so prudent with the Windows version!

    Installing now, so will be back with feedback later but a thought which pops into my head which may, or may not be relevant so apologies if the latter:

    Last week I wiped my windows partition simply because the SIZE of the partition had become insufficient (my bad habit of buying expensive extensions of Flight Simulator caught on!). There seems to be no way to expand that size after creating the partition. Is this something which is doable with a back up - i.e. could the backup be placed onto a newly created larger partition? That would be a really good thing to have for me at least!!

    Also have a (1tb) "Fusion drive" which, on the iMac like at least, is becoming increasingly the default. I imagine this product will work ok with this, but i know some funny restrictions sometimes apply to this somewhat unconventional "hack" of a hybrid system on the mac!

    Thanks again for developing this product!

    William
     
  3. William Dowell

    William Dowell Registered Member

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    Ps I should clarify - I realise Camptune exists, but doesn't work on Fusion drives! Perhaps this backup solution is a way to get around that?
     
  4. ziggy29

    ziggy29 Registered Member

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    I'm trying this out... or would if it would work. I open the app from the menu bar and then it asks me to select a Source. (I assume this is my Boot Camp volume.) Problem is, it finds no volumes at all. I can leave the window open for several minutes and it doesn't find my Boot Camp volume. Are there some restrictions on what Boot Camp volumes this application will find?
     
  5. fprstudio

    fprstudio Registered Member

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    Same as ziggy29, Source states "Source Disk not found" and when you click the "Select Source" button, the window is empty. Is not detecting my Boot Camp Partition. So far NOT WORKING!!!!
     
  6. William Dowell

    William Dowell Registered Member

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    Mine worked as expected, I've apparently a successful back up and set it up for 9am backups.
    I had to wait a few seconds for the disk to be found, but it was automatically without issue. My partition has windows 7 (64bit) and it is called BOOTCAMP
     
  7. James Hale

    James Hale Registered Member

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    tried it last night post Yosemite and HD upgrade.
    successfully found and copied BC partition to disk image.
    partitioned new startup disk to include a new empty BC partition.
    Successfully copied previously created disk image to new partition.
    Both partitions mounted on desktop.
    Did note that the elapsed time etc was a bit funky on the disk image restore. would progress up a few seconds then drop down a few, see sawing like this 'til completion.
    Will test partitions a bit down the track but so far so good.
     
  8. Trebuin

    Trebuin Registered Member

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    I'm testing this now using a network setup...it does not recognize any network drives as other programs do. I have to select the macbook system, then I can see the connected drives. I tried two network drives: Drobo connected via USB to ASUS NAS functioning as a SMB shared drive. The program accepts the connection but fails to recognize the drive once I begin the backup. This is my preferred backup due to available space and network speed. The second device is the AC Apple Time Capsule. This one connected again, and it did recognize the connection once running the backup.

    First: The backup always starts with a diskcheck. I absolutely hate this as it has corrupted more drives than I can count. Is there a way to make this optional? I would prefer optional with a warning "if disk has errors, backup and restore may not be possible. We recommend backing up a second time with disk check enabled and then test a restore to verify functionality." This would require that each backup be completely different...not "only changes from previous backup."

    Second: Network backup makes my eyes want to bleed...it is really slow. But I do have 279GB to back up. It took about 15 mins after then checkup before it appeared to show any progress. I'm at 10 hours now to back up. That's about 8 MBps, not too shabby and matches my current airport speed...again, I want to cry. I would recommend finding a way to show that the backup is still progressing during that 15 min of dead time. The blue bar showed complete, though it had clearly not begun.

    Third: Could we have an option to keep an image that we choose never to delete or update? I like to keep an initial operating system setup image with the basic programs just in case. This gives me the option to revert back without reinstalling the OS if the last few images are corrupt. I always keep a separate copy of my profile folder which is around 20GB as opposed to 279 with all the programs and games.

    Recommendations:
    1) I would also recommend adding a percentage complete in xxx.x% format.

    2) I would also recommend adding a header to the progress bar so we can see what process it refers to.

    3) The destination selection could be better designed. When I wanted to rename a folder I created, I could not hit enter to rename it (mac default). There is also no rename feature as an alternate. Again, it does not show any network drives. I have not tested an attempt to connect to a network drive yet, but will as soon as I have a good connection.

    Questions:
    1) Are the images compressed? IE, sectors with no data between a range are compressed to only a few KB rather than occupying every bite if used date if there were several gigs of emptiness in a perfect series.

    2) Does the backup consider deleting the pagefile and other garbage files to save space and time?

    Thank you for your time.

    Respectfully,
    Sean
     
  9. Paragon_MA

    Paragon_MA Paragon Moderator

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    We appreciate your current feedback and kindly ask all who encounter problem with Bootcamp partition detection ("Source Disk not found") to provide logs from Boot Camp Backup. This would really help us to investigate and fix the issue.
    Log collection instruction can be found in the first post or within page 18 of the manual: http://download.paragon-software.com/doc/BackupBootCamp_eng_manual.pdf

    Thank you for your cooperation.
     
  10. fprstudio

    fprstudio Registered Member

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    Tried again today and is same as before "Source Disk not found"
     

    Attached Files:

  11. ziggy29

    ziggy29 Registered Member

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    OK, just sent my log files. What I am seeing is identical to the screen shots shown directly above.

    I have a Mac Mini Server (2012) with two 1 TB drives. One is dedicated to Mac OS X and the other to Windows (Boot Camp partition). If it helps, I do occasionally run virtualization software (VMWare Fusion 6) against the Bootcamp drive and I would expect such a backup to fail while Windows is running in a virtual machine using the Bootcamp volume (in fact, the Bootcamp drive isn't mounted and visible to OS X while running Windows in a VM), but it shouldn't cause a problem when the Boot Camp partition is not booted up or being used... should it?
     
    Last edited: Oct 21, 2014
  12. Trebuin

    Trebuin Registered Member

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    About finished with that network backup...it's taking a bit longer than I thought, but it is the initial backup. The good news is that I somehow transitioned from one access point to another without interrupting the backup stream. The downside is that I think doing that has made the data box/log box to go blank. That is not a critical bug, but I'll look into it. I need to get ahold of an AC card to upgrade my macbook's wifi speed since I have routers that can support it.

    My intent to test:
    1) Network transition by disabling and re-enabling
    2) Network transition by going out of range of the first AP
    3) Network transition by going to sleep and waking the notebook
     
  13. Trebuin

    Trebuin Registered Member

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    Well, the backup completed fine, but the disk check resulted in a 0xc000021a boot error. I expected this as OS X disk utility detected errors before backing up. I had to force restart twice before it booted to the repair partition then I did the repair boot which worked fine on the first try...that's a first for me. It's up and running and I'll be backing this up to see how the incremental works now.
     
  14. Trebuin

    Trebuin Registered Member

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    Just a thought: I would love to have some instructions pop up during a manual backup that shows the process of restoring the partition. Honestly, I have no clue. If my drive up and died, I'd start with using time machine (or CCC) and recover from that, then build a bootcamp partition, but, I would have no clue as to what size it should be. It would be nice if I could simply avoid using the bootcamp setup all together.

    Also, Incremental via network (airport TC) worked excellent. Successful boot, only took between 30-60 minutes to complete. Booted successfully. I have not tested to see if the drive will recover, I'll leave that testing to someone else unless my computer actually crashes. This is leaps and bounds ahead of winclone already. If this gets designed a little more like Acronis does their incremental, that would perfect this...but don't get too bloated.

    I'll end up testing a swap of location and back to see if the program recognizes the original set of backups. The big test will be upon the release of Windows 10. Using the partition sizing tool or winclone broke the ability to upgrade my windows before. It resulted in me having to repair every upgrade and enter some weird partition commands. Essentially, windows couldn't figure out what the system partition was during the upgrade.

    After the swap and network AP switching tests, I'll focus on the SMB backup. My apple drive had only 1TB free before my 300MB backup. Hopefully this can be managed a bit with future options. My primary backup is a drobo with at least 4TB free. Eventually, I'll use an external when I deploy.
     
  15. Trebuin

    Trebuin Registered Member

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    Issue: if using network, upon reboot or restore from sleep, the program will not reinitialize the connection during scheduled time and reports "Application is not configured." A solution would be to recognize the type of network connection and reestablish.

    Edit: After bringing my computer out of standby and having manually connecting to the network drive...the backup recognized that automatically then executed the backup successfully. This could be solved with a simple script either by selecting an option: "connect to A NAS drive prior to backup" with an address block, or simply provide a network target with that script built in. If the NAS is already connected, it may pop up an error related to it already being connected.
     
    Last edited: Oct 23, 2014
  16. Fir

    Fir Registered Member

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    I have the same problem as a few of the guys here with "Source Disk not found". Sent my log file to beta-test
     
  17. WDSurfer

    WDSurfer Registered Member

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    I have the same "Source Disk not found" issue with my 3TB Fusion Drive. In order to install Boot Camp I had to partition my drive into three parts. In order to keep the BootCamp partition inside the 2.2 TB limit I created a 1.67 TB Macintosh HD partition followed by a 0.5 TB BOOTCAMP partition followed by a 0.94 TB MacBonus partition. I will send my log file via email.
     
  18. TKat

    TKat Registered Member

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    I just purchased a new SSD for my MacBook Pro and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try this program. I was able to select my Boot Camp partition and create the image of it. First suggestion is that it would be great to be able to directly clone a Boot Camp Partition to another drive without having to make the image file first (single step instead of 2 steps). I then restored the image to the new partition on the SSD. It appeared to work and I didn't get any error messages, but when I tried to boot from the new Boot Camp partition I got the error message that Windows couldn't boot because \windows\system 32\winload.exe was dammaged 0xc000000e Windows wanted me to boot from the install disk to repair. I tried 2 times restoring from the image file but got the same results both times.
     
  19. cliff99

    cliff99 Registered Member

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    No Problems so far backed up as expected yet to try a restore, certainly a program which has long been missing from the arsenal for Mac/Win users. I tried Winclone but not so good , this looks like it will be great once it has matured a little. I backed up from a Bootcamp Partition on a SSD to a HDD on my Mac mini no problems.
     
  20. WDSurfer

    WDSurfer Registered Member

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    If Boot Camp Backup returns "Source Disk not found", why not allow the user to input the name of their Source Disk? I have a working Boot Camp Partition on my Fusion drive with a unique name. Armed with the name of the partition or alternatively the UNIX path to it, Boot Camp Backup should be able to find it.
     
  21. Trebuin

    Trebuin Registered Member

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    I started testing the network transition and have some various results...I need to confirm first that the program is updating and not simply expanding. The current command is "copy allocated blocks" which sounds like it is copying.

    *edit: updated tests...copy works*

    1) Network transition by disabling and re-enabling: causes finder to freeze and takes 10+mins to restore activity. Backup does resume, though. This needs work
    2) Network transition by going out of range of the first AP: smooth transition...works great
    3) Network transition by going to sleep and waking the notebook: Not tested yet
    4) Resume backup from sleep: works fine
    5) Bootcamp running during backup: you can run bootcamp...Not necessarily a good thing

    Apart from this...my backup hit the 7 day default point and I think is purging the first initial backup...it's expanding to double in size. edit: as it turns out, it did not purge the initial backup but doubled the entire thing for some reason, then shrunk it back to the original size. This backup took about 16 hrs over the network. old: I think you really need to work a plan to keep the original image or give us control on when to delete the original one. Over the network, this is critical and would make this a very good feature.
     
    Last edited: Oct 30, 2014
  22. CekariYH

    CekariYH Registered Member

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    Just downloaded and installed the Boot Camp Backup, but it can't find my Boot Camp. I'm using Parallels Desktop 10 as well, could it be that's way it don't find my Boot Camp?
    Tried both with or without Parallels started.
     
  23. Trebuin

    Trebuin Registered Member

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    I've seen that happen before on my system. For me, this was caused either by backing up and restoring using winclone or by adjusting the partition sizes. Hopefully with everything being through paragon, I will never have to worry about that again. I'm pretty sure winclone was the culprit. You can try repairing the disk, but will probably have to rebuild your partitions. Chkdsk as well. Let us know if you have any progress.
     
  24. Trebuin

    Trebuin Registered Member

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    I starting to look at backing up using a network setup...Drobo connected via USB to an ASUS router. This is where it fails. The error is "Error: Bad parameter of function." The drive is formatted as NTFS and sharing via SMB.

    Edit:
    After many tries, I have finally gotten a successful execution. It seems I have to let the program idle out the SMB connection then initialize the backup.

    Edit 2:
    On osx, the transfer to an SMB is a bit slower than to the time capsule. It ended up crashing at around 24 hrs into it and I had to restart the backup. I will restart and collect the logs after the backup...this will probably take two days.

    Recommend: ability to rescan & resume incomplete backups. 300GB is taking quite a bit to backup.

    Problem:
    During the extensive backup, the data eventually clears...progress bar shows nothing and all the text clears out.
     
    Last edited: Nov 4, 2014
  25. CekariYH

    CekariYH Registered Member

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    So even backing up with winclone would cause this? Strange.
    Anyway, the bootcamp part was newly created on fresh new drive and so was the OS X part.
    Repairing and checkdisk or the Mac equivalent reports no errors on either partition.

    I forgot one thing in previous post. Mac OS and Boot Camp is on a brand new, checked external Thunderbolt drive as I didn't want the Boot Camp on my Main Internal drive.

    BTW, what is the VMDK mounter for. it points to my Documents folder/Map?
     
    Last edited: Nov 5, 2014
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