Exclude Parallels from Time Machine

[garneaum]

I highly recommend that you exclude Parallels from Time Machine in Leopard.
I originally did not exclude it, and then my computer kept getting bogged down as it kept backing up a large hdd file every hour (because I was using Parallels). My external HD partition for my backup got filled up very quickly too.
Once I excluded the Parallels folder, Time Machine was able to do its hourly backups very quickly.
So, I'll keep manually backing up Parallels the same I used to, and let Time Machine take care of the rest.

Does anyone know of a better solution?

[Eru Ithildur]

You could make a cron job that will back-up your Parallels at set intervals.

[jasonw]

I've been using a shell script which runs from cron that uses osascript to tell Parallels to quit and then does a full system backup (with a few exclusions: /tmp, /dev, etc) using rdiff-backup to my file server and then resumes the VM again. This has been working well since I started it around when #3188 was released with the exception of the known Video Memory Error (http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=14933) issue.

I'd love to use Time Machine (for everything except Parallels I guess) instead of rdiff-backup but it doesn't look like Time Machine can backup over SSH or CIFS to my Debian box. I tried the sparseimage trick but that didn't work. Anyway, I'm going off topic now...

[branthenne]

I run my parallels from an external hard drive (actually the same one that runs time machine) but in a different partition. It's a little low-tech, but works fairly well. I don't notice much lag after having moved it, but I mostly use parallels for MS Office, browser testing, and other areas where I need to anticipate my clients' system. For gaming and stuff, I don't know if that would be as viable an option.

[Eru Ithildur]

Here is a good discussion of Time Machine and Parallels VMs: http://forums.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=17850&highlight=time+machine+back-up+vm

Actually running Parallels from an external is frequently recommended because of the I/O on must HDs.

[PrestonP]

You could make a cron job that will back-up your Parallels at set intervals.

Can you show us how to to setup this Cron job? I would like to do this with a number of different files.