Best disk cloning solution

[ZBoater]

On my PC I've sworn by Acronis True Image. That thing is rock solid. It lets me take snapshots of my hard drive and makes restoring them a snap.

What are the best solutions to make a disc image on a MacBook Air?

Let me say I have a Time Capsule, so I am assuming my OSX partition will be backed up regularly, and so will my wife's.

But on mine I am installing Windows 7 on a Boot Camp partition, and I am hoping to get a solution that let's me boot off a USB drive, image the whole drive (Windows 7, OSx, recovery partition, everything) and in case of disaster let me restore the entire drive. I've read some folks have used True Image this way but Acronis doesn't officially support it.

Alternatives?

 

[OSMac]

Carbon Copy Cloner works great here, I use it to clone the OS drive while OSX is running.
It does a clone not a file like in TI, so you need another drive.

 

[Paulywauly]

Carbon Copy Cloner works great here.

+1 - saved my techno butt numerous times. Very useful and relativly simple to use

 

[GGJstudios]

Carbon Copy Cloner is the best tool I've found for cloning. Some prefer SuperDuper!, which does basically the same thing.

 

[uicandrew]

superduper had the best user interface when i compared it to carbon copy cloner (ccc). i screwed up my copy using ccc, but super duper was a breeze and i love it.

 

[ZBoater]

Will either of these make a copy of the Win7 boot camp partition? How about the system restore partition?

 

[GGJstudios]

Will either of these make a copy of the Win7 boot camp partition?

No.

How about the system restore partition?

Yes, they should.

 

[tom vilsack]

Carbon Copy Cloner works great here, I use it to clone the OS drive while OSX is running.
It does a clone not a file like in TI, so you need another drive.

you can make a single file (burn to dvd,usb ect) it's just not bootable....perhaps one could still restore by using Command-R and then go into Disk Utility

 

[ZBoater]

With Time Machine I'm thinking my OS X partition is covered. I'm more concerned about the Bootcamp partition, which Time Machine automatically excludes.

I'm ok with booting off a USB (which is how I do Acronis anyway). I was just hoping there was a supported product out there that could handle the whole drive, including recovery, OS X, and Boot Camp.

 

[theSeb]

Will either of these make a copy of the Win7 boot camp partition? How about the system restore partition?

Get winClone for that.

 

[ZBoater]

I'm giving Clonezilla a shot. It created a bootable USB drive and it's backing up the whole 256GB drive onto an external 1TB drive I have formatted as FAT32. It is creating one image broken up into 2GB files.

It's a bit 80's looking, but it seems to do it's thing. Problem is I wont know if it REALLY works until I restore the image, and I'm not sure I want to test that.

There has got to be a commercial product that does this better...