I have a VM that's stored on a secondary drive on my Mac (an external RAID drive connected via Thunderbolt), i.e. not on the disk which includes macOS and my account home folder. So my Documents folder doesn't include the .pvm file for this particular VM (although oddly enough it DOES include a tiny .pvm file with the same name as this VM, but not modified since 2017.) I back up my Mac with Time Machine, and the VM in question has the SmartGuard box checked along with "Optimize for Time Machine". If I look at Time Machine, the external RAID drive is EXCLUDED from Time Machine backups - I think that was done by default by macOS because it's technically a "removable" drive. Am I correct in assuming that the VM is not actually being backed up by Time Machine, and that I need to remove the exclusion for the external RAID drive in order for the VM to be properly backed up by Time Machine? Also, will Time Machine still only back up the latest snapshot of the VM even though the VM is stored on an external "removable" drive? My guess is that this happens because the base HDD image and other snapshots don't get modified but the latest snapshot does, so Time Machine only backs up what's changed and that's the latest snapshot - is my reasoning correct here? Thanks!
Hello @JohnO9 , you're right, when your machine is backed up, only the most recent changes are saved (the latest snapshot), so the backup process takes less time and uses less space on your Time Machine storage device. And also in order to back up your VM with the Time Machine you need to include your RAID drive to the Time Machine backup.
Hello, you can post any questions you have here and we will move it to the correct thread or create a new one.
Hello, I have parallels 15 and windows 10. Recently (last 2 weeks), I am having troubles running parallels and windows--what this means is that parallels just doesn't open, it says "starting" and then takes 5-10 minutes to move to windows, and then windows takes its own sweet time (says, "checking discs" etc. ). If the windows finally opens--sometimes after multiple tries and spending over 30 minutes--some of my programs suddenly freeze and I need to use the task bar to get out of those programs. It's killing my productivity. Is there any solution? Or, do I have to get out of parallels and move to something else? Thanks, Sanjay
Hello does the Parallels Desktop start during the 10 minutes and then Windows VM also take to much time to start? Could you collect the tech report after the issue reproduced and reply us back with the report's ID number?
