Boot Camp and Time Machine, for consumers only

This note from a reader regarding my post on Time Machine erasing my Boot Camp partition:

I have to comment that neither Time Machine nor Bootcamp are enterprise

apps. They are so totally consumer-level that they should almost be banned

from business use.

I agree that the products don’t pass the enterprise test. I don’t think they were built to. Time Machine is billed as a simple out-of-the-box solution, so it appeals to professionals and small businesses the way that iMovie and Garage Band do: They are simple, consumer-targeted products that have legitimate business use. Time Machine’s promise — foolproof, hands-off backup and versioning — is a worthwhile one, but poorly executed by Time Machine.

In my next post, I’ll make it clear that Time Capsule, named to co-market with Time Machine, is a top-shelf product in its own right and highly scalable. While Apple markets a link between Time Machine and Time Capsule, buyers must consider the solutions separately.

As to Boot Camp, to my chagrin and after championing the lack of need for it given the quality and speed of virtualization solutions from Parallels and VMware, I found that Boot Camp is unavoidable for professionals that truly live with one foot in Windows territory and one in the Mac. I have two feet on the Mac side and one in Windows, but Boot Camp offers some advantages that Windows virtualization cannot:

• Booting Windows allows access to peripherals requiring native (e.g., ExpressCard, USB Ethernet, any expansion card in Mac Pro) device drivers written for Windows. Mac virtualization amazingly covers most things you can plug into USB. For me, the driver limitation hits hardest with the GPU. VMware and Parallels have made many advances in graphics acceleration, but multimedia applications remain unworkable in Mac virtualization.
• Whether booting to the image or running the image under OS X in virtualization, the Boot Camp partition is accessed as an NTFS volume, not as an HFS file that contains a virtual NTFS disk. Performance is better native, but I find it most handy that even when virtualization is not running, the Boot Camp NTFS volume is mounted read-only and accessible in Finder and /Volumes.
• When you install Windows on a Boot Camp volume, a single Windows license covers you for virtual and native operation. You do have to activate twice, but that doesn’t require a second license.
• During a stint of primarily running Windows, Macs can set the boot disk to launch Windows directly. Windows as a virtual guest of OS X requires OS X startup and log-in.

These are personal advantages for those who own their Macs. Boot Camp has strong disadvantages for individuals and enterprises:

• Apple drivers are required to operate Boot Camp. Apple makes drivers only for Windows, and they’re relatively fragile as Microsoft or Apple evolves hardware or software. Understandably, Apple doesn’t make tracking every Windows hot fix and service pack with new drivers a priority. Requiring Apple driver also means that Boot Camp can’t be used to boot Solaris, BSD or other x86 operating systems.
• VMware and Parallels Virtual disks can have the space opened up by deleted files recovered, shrinking the virtual disk’s size. Boot Camp partitions are fixed in size.
• Boot Camp negates the obvious advantage of running OS X and Windows simultaneously.
• Despite the fact that the mounted Boot Camp partition is read-only, the partition itself can be wiped out by utilities that are unaware of Boot Camp.
• Boot Camp is not subjected to or protected by OS X security, group policy or remote management. An OS X user cannot operate outside the reach of an administrator, but using Boot Camp allows a Mac user who has been issued a company-owned machine to bypass these protections.

All things considered, the reader is correct: It practically falls to enterprise Mac administrators to create and enforce policies forbidding the use of Boot Camp. Windows guests under OS X virtualization have none of the disadvantages I’ve described. A Mac user can be given administrative privileges in a virtual Windows guest and have inescapable bozo user status in OS X.