[SOLVED] How to set up external hard drive to back up dual boot Mac computer?

[Watchwork]

I have a MacBook Pro running Dual Boot Windows 7 and OS High Sierra. I'm planning on replacing my Windows partition with Linux, but want to make a full system clone before I attempt any reformatting.

I'm wondering what the best way is to format my external hard drive for cloning. It seems there isn't a way to take a disk clone of both partitions at the same time, so I'm gonna need to do two separate clones. Should I partition my external hard drive to a NTFS and HFS partition for each backup, or can I clone both to one FAT32 partition?

Any advice and suggestions on the matter is much appreciated.

 

[kenrivers]

Instead of FAT32 you could try exFAT as it allows for larger file sizes and is recognized by both Mac OS and Windows. Both OSs allow you read and write to an exFAT formatted drive.

 

[Watchwork]

So I eventually solved this, figured I'd post my answer here for anyone who may have a similar question in the future. After some extensive research, I believe this is the best way to backup a both Windows 7 and macOS on a single external HDD or SSD.

First I backed up my MacOS partition. Using Disk utility, I erased my external SSD and formatted it as MacOS Extended (Journaled). This is the best formatting option to interact with the Mac OS. Next, I tried booting up into Recovery Mode and Restoring my Mac hard drive to my external SSD, but due to High Sierra changing the formatting of your Mac Disk to an APFS container, this solution seems to be bugged and will fail at the very end of backup process (So don't waste two hours trying this solution unless you know Apple has fixed this issue). A better alternative is to use Carbon Copy Cloner, which you can get a free trial of, to clone your Mac disk.

After following the instructions on how to use Carbon Copy Cloner, you will end up with a backup of your MacOS on your external Hard Drive. Next you go to Disk Utility, add a second partition to your external disk, and resize your second partition accordingly (I resized my second partition to take up all the remaining space on my external SSD that wasn't used by my Mac Backup. You can resize however you want as long as you leave enough space for both backups). Format this second partition as ExFat.

Next you will want to boot up into your Window partition. You're going to need to download a cloning utility for windows. I was operating on windows 7 and downloaded EaseUS as it seemed to be the best, free software I could get. Following your Cloning software guide, and clone your BootCamp partition to your newly created ExFat partition on your external HDD.

and Bam, you've got a backup for both Mac OS and Windows on a single external HDD. If you've got extra space left over, you can even use your external HDD for storing other stuff by creating a new partition or using unused space on the ExFat partition.