Controlling Incremental Backup

I first have to say that Winclone saved my bacon, the backup image was stored on the local disk and was thus in my time machine backup on the Mac side. The OS had a major fault (macOS) and I had to wipe and reinstall from scratch. This of course wiped the Windows partition as well. Thanks to Winclone I was able to restore the Windows install within about 20 minutes of getting the Time Machine backup reloaded.

Now, I am hitting a bit of a wall on something.

My Macbook Pro only has 256GB on the internal drive and the Windows install has to be at least 64GB That plus the backup takes up a lot of space. I have an external disk and I’m working o moving my Windows partition to that disk since it’s a 1TB disk. My question is about controlling the incremental backup. Being on the external drive doesn’t solve the need for a backup of the OS. The problem is that Winclone Incremental Backup doesn’t seem to understand that sometimes an external disk is not connected.

Is there a way to do one of the following:

  • Have Winclone begin imaging a partition from the command line.
  • Have Winclone wait silently until the external disk is connected, then run a backup (if it hasn’t been run as scheduled).

Either works, if I can control the backup from the command line I can write a script to execute it when I want and all, no big deal. Very much worth it. I would like this to be native to Winclone but I understand that my use case may not be very common.

I also still have an issue where if it misses an scheduled backup, it then tries to image the Windows partition every single time it starts even if it just reimaged the Windows partition 10 minutes ago, and it still wants to run a backup i am on battery and I’d rather it not do that as it uses a lot of power.

I’d appreciate any help that anyone can provide, thank you.