Another SharePoint Consultant with a Mac Book Pro…

Apparently I am not the only .NET/Microsoft Platform/SharePoint Consultant that uses a Mac Book Pro, Andrew Connell, Spencer Harbar and others have done this as well.  I just like the hardware Apple produces, plus having the ability to have multiple platforms at hand is awesome!  I’ve been using this hardware for about 5 months and have absolutely no complaints. 

A few days ago I thought it would be terrible to loose all my configuration and software settings should the Boot Camp partition becomes unusable.  So, I went on a quest to figure out the fastest and safest way to backup my entire partition and recover it with minimal downtime.

On this partition, I have Windows 2008 and all the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 required development tools.

On Disaster Recovery

I recently became a bit more conscientious about disaster recovery, and so I thought that I should have a plan to recover my Boot Camp Partition should I loose it for some reason (of course, being a developer, there is a greater chance).

Here are the options I looked at.

1. Use Windows Server Backup to produce the VHD and store it on an external drive
2. Use Acronis True Image Enterprise with Universal Restore ( tried restoring to VM but no luck) to create an Image
3. Use Winclone to backup my Boot Camp partition.

In a nutshell, 1 and 2 failed, there are issues with rebooting it appropriately, I may have gotten it to work, but at this point I wanted to ensure I have something in place sooner rather than later and so I used Winclone.

I used Winclone to accomplish my task.  However, I ran into an issue where as soon as Winclone backed up my partition, it became unusable.  I found out there was some order of the tables that got screwed up, so I ran the gptrefresh command as mentioned by the creator of the tool and it worked!  After running that, I was able to boot again with my Boot Camp partition.

The one thing I wish I had was a 64bit computer so that  I can play with Hyper-V on Windows 2008 Server!

Happy developing using the Mac Book Pro!

-Oscar