How best to restore BootCamp partition from Acronis TrueImage backup?

The replacement for my dead Macbook Pro Retina arrived yesterday, and the Mac side of things was restored from a Synology NAS in 30 mins, which was great...

But on the BootCamp partition, it's a different story: I was using Acronis TrueImage for my Windows backups, and a recent backup was indeed sitting happily on the NAS - but, how to restore it?

The Acronis Recovery CD won't run on a Mac, apparently (and, I have no superdrive...)

After some thought and experiment, here's what I ended up doing

  • Installed Acronis trial version on a 'real' PC
  • Connect a USB disk to the PC
  • Recover the bootcamp partition to the USB disk
  • Connect the USB disk to the Mac
  • Install WinClone on the Mac ($20 well spent...)
  • Create a WInClone image file from the USB disk (slow...)
  • Create a FAT partition on the Macbook SSD
  • Restore the WinClone image onto the FAT partition
  • Reboot, and pray...

Now, while this worked, and the bootcamp partition was successfully re-added to VmWare fusion, it feels like a really long-winded way of doing it.

So, Is there a more direct way of doing this? Could Target Disk mode help (thunderbolt, remember...)

Note - I know I could in future just keep a Winclone backup on the NAS, but then I'd lose the ability to extract individual files from the backup, and also I'd be backing up the entire partition each time, rather than just the changes.


By using enclosure for your 2.5" disks, I think you could just run the True Image on a PC to copy your TIB backup to your new partition on the SSD. How about this as an idea?