Failed Drive Recovery - MacBook Air and Boot Camp

I own HDM 11 Suite for Family because I have an iMac and 2 Macbook Airs running Lion and Win 7 Pro using the standard Boot Camp setup. I'm testing a backup/recovery strategy in the event of a hard drive failure:

1- Regular incremental total drive backups to a Win Server 2008 network share. Tested ok.

2- (Pretend a hard drive failure and replacement).

3- On a good Mac copy the network drive backup to a USB drive (because I cannot see the network from the MacbookAir using WinPE Recovery CD and cannot inject suitable drivers).
This copy is tested ok.

4- On "bad" Mac boot with WinPE Recovery CD and in Recovery browse to the backed up drive image containing the Lion and Win 7 on the USB drive. Tested ok.

5- But I'm afraid to do the actual restore until I get some reassurance that this procedure will likely work.

- Will it work?

- Is there a weakness in my strategy that I may be overlooking?

- Is there a better way to handle a drive failure on iMacs and MacBook Airs with Lion and Boot Camp?

Thanks very much for any input at all.
Scared Jim

 

Congratulations on having the good sense to test out the recovery method before you really need it.

Unfortunately, I'm a PC user and can't help with anything MAC specific and the posts on this forum seem to be virtually PC related.

If by "tested OK" you mean that it did the Paragon Verify then that shows you can find the archive, read it into memory and successfully recreate whatever checksums Paragon placed into the archive when it was built.

While that is well and (very) good it doesn't mean everything else will be done correctly on the HD when the restore is done. The absolutely best test is to bite the bullet and and buy, beg, borrow or steal a spare HD to place in the machine to do the restore on in case the restore fails for some reason. One of the first things that happens on a restore (not just Paragon) is that the old disk structure relating to the restore is deleted and then the restore is done and whatever adjustments are made to the disk. You can see if anything goes wrong then you will be left with nothing workable on the disk.

I know buying another HD isn't what most people want to do but you can look at it as having a spare ready to do if you do have a failure or you can buy another empty enclosure and use it as another external.