Mac – Restore from Time Machine after installing Bootcamp

This may well be too late to be helpful, but it is quite possible to back up a Boot Camp volume via Time Machine. (And the previous answerer clearly didn't even understand the question, since he appears to be talking about writing backups to an NTFS drive.)

In fact, it's really easy. Rename the 'BOOTCAMP' volume to anything other than 'BOOTCAMP' and Time Machine will recognize it as a back-up-able drive. Then go to the Time Machine preference panel and click on 'Options...' You should now be able to select your NTFS volume and remove it from the exclusion list. Next time you run a backup, it will back up the NTFS drive.

HOWEVER: It may not be possible to restore a bootable NTFS drive from a Time Machine backup, due to permissions issues, metadata, etc. (Restoring would involve installing NTFS-3g or otherwise mounting an NTFS volume as read/write, and then restoring files to that, too, so remember there's an extra step.) Given that, though, it's a good way of saving your data files on Windows, if you have enough room on your backup drive.

If I have time, I may try a full restore from my backup to my boot camp partition. If I do, I'll record the results here.

EDIT: This may only work with 10.6, and/or may only work if you have MacFUSE and NTFS-3G installed.

EDIT: As far as I can tell, this has not worked correctly since 10.7. I have not yet tested it with 10.9, but in both 10.7 and 10.8 the boot camp partition is not backed up no matter what it is named.

Four options are available for you - none of them is a clear winner that works in all cases:

• Try to force the issue with the command line tmutil inheritbackup command
• Ditch the backup history and start over (not good, but quick)
• Use a tool like BackupLoupe and see if you can thin space on the drive to make enough room for the "estimated" amount of storage for the next backup.
• Baby sit the backup, by excluding most of the drive and unexcluding it in less than 250 GB chunks.

This last option has gotten me over the hump several times when clients cannot afford to lose their backup. I image their backup drive before starting (just in case) and then use the Time Machine System Preference options to exclude most of the drive. The first option is the most precise if you are comfortable with the terminal application and command line tools.

By excluding everything except perhaps /Library and /System you should be between 10 and 30 GB for the estimated size of a Full Backup and Time Machine will let you make a new backup. Then the trick is to slowly remove items from the exclusion list in stages to not have the next backup estimate exceed the remaining free space on your backup volume.