

Acronis upgrade was being offered at a steep discount so I bought it but I wouldn't mind a free alternative. regedit, but it allows you to backup before you mess up. Most likely issue you mess up the boot loader so you can't get to one or the other OS, but update grub and there was a tool for windows. It's even learnt what idiots some of its users are and won't let you delete certain things with a lot of hard work. Windows, well that's fairly indestructible. sudo is your friend and think twice before running any command with the word 'purge' in it. What is it? ctrl + alt + F1, etc to switch to a console if you break the display manager. You can only be in a situation where it's temporarily unavailable.

Since you can snapshot the vm there is no issue if you make a mistake or break the VM and with windows keep the system restore turned on. I do all my testing in a VM and have my VM SSD clean with the work on the backup nas. I think the gnome-disk utility can make images, but not while the system is on, but you may be able to run it from a live image. I think it grabs the linux partitions too although it has no idea what is in them. I've restored windows straight back to my hard drive and moved windows to a VM using this tool. I use the free version of reflect that will image your hard drive from windows while it's turned on.
